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GEORGE BERNARD 

:: SHAW :: 



By 
GILBERT K5 CHESTERTON 



Portrait Sketches of 

George Bernard Shaw and Gilbert K. Chesterdon 

By Mrs. Barney-Washington 



NEW YORK 

JOHN LANE COMPANY 

MCMIX 



COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY 
JOHN LANE COMPANY 



C r 



)^{)^- 



AUJ 25 1909 



THE PLIMPTON PRESS, NORWOOD, MASS. 



Introduction to the First Edition 



MOST people either say that they 
agree with Bernard Shaw or that 
they do not understand him. I 
am the only person who understands him, and 



I do not agree with him. 



G. K. C. 



The Problem of a Preface 



A PECULIAR difficulty arrests the 
writer of this rough study at the 
very start. Many people know 

Mr. Bernard Shaw chiefly as a man 
who would write a very long preface even to a 
very short play. And there is truth in the 
idea; he is indeed a very prefatory sort of 
person. He always gives the explanation 
before the incident; but so, for the matter 
of that, does the Gospel of St. John. For 
Bernard Shaw, as for the mystics, Christian and 
heathen (and Shaw is best described as a 
heathen mystic), the philosophy of facts is 
anterior to the facts themselves. In due time we 
come to the fact, the incarnation; but in the 
beginning; was the word. 

This produces upon many minds an impres- 
sion of needless preparation and a kind of 
bustling prolixity. But the truth is that the 
very rapidity of such a man's mind makes 
him seem slow in getting to the point. It is 
positively because he is quick-witted that he is 
long-winded. A quick eye for ideas may 
actually make a writer slow in reaching his 



George Bernard Shaw 



goal, just as a quick eye for landscapes might 
make a motorist slow in reaching Brighton. 
An original man has to pause at every allusion 
or simile to re-explain historical parallels, to 
re-shape distorted words. Any ordinary leader- 
writer (let us say) might write swiftly and 
smoothly something like this: "The element 
of religion in the Puritan rebellion, if hostile 
to art, yet saved the movement from some 
of the evils in which the French Revolution 
involved morality." Now a man like Mr. Shaw, 
who has his own views on everything, would 
he forced to make the sentence long and broken 
instead of swift and smooth. He would say 
something like: "The element of religion, 
as I explain religion, in the Puritan rebellion 
(which you wholly misunderstand) if hostile to 
art — that is what I mean b}^ art — may have saved 
it from some evils (remember my definition of 
evil) in which the French Revolution — of which 
I ha^'e my own opinion — involved morality, 
which I will define for you in a minute." That 
is the worst of being a really universal sceptic 
and philosopher; it is such slow work. The 
very forest of the man's thoughts chokes up 
his thoroughfare. A man must be orthodox 
upon most things, or he will never even have 
time to preach his own heres}'. 

8 



The Problem of a Preface 



Now the same difficulty which affects the 
work of Bernard Shaw affects also any book 
about him. There is an unavoidable artistic 
necessity to put the preface before the play; 
that is, there is a necessity to say something 
of what Bernard Shaw's experience means 
before one even says what it was. We have 
to mention what he did when we have already 
explained why he did it. Viewed superficially, 
his life consists of fairly conventional incidents, 
and niight easily fall under fairly conventional 
phrases. It might be the life of any Dublin 
clerk or Manchester Socialist or London 
author, ii I touch on the man's life before 
his work, it will seem trivial; yet taken with 
his work it is most important. In short, one 
could scarcely know what Shaw's doings meant 
unless one knew what he meant by them. 
This difficulty in mere order and construction 
has puzzled me very much. I am going to 
overcome it, clumsily perhaps, but in the way 
which affects me as most sincere. Before 
I write even a slight suggestion of his relation 
to the stage, I am going to write of three soils 
or atmospheres out of which that relation 
grew. In other words, before I write of Shaw 
I will write of the three great influences upon 
Shaw. Thev were all three there before he 



George Bernard Shaw 



was born, yet each one of them is himself and 
a very vivid portrait of him from one point 
of view. I have called these three traditions: 
"The Irishman," "The Puritan," and "The 
Progressive." I do not see how this prefatory 
theorising is to be avoided; for if I simply 
said, for instance, that Bernard Shaw w^as an 
Irishman, the impression produced on the 
reader might be remote from my thought and, 
what is more important, from Shaw's. People 
might think, for instance, that I meant that he 
was "irresponsible." That would throw out 
the whole plan of these pages, for if there 
is one thing that Shaw is not, it is irresponsible. 
The responsibility in him rings like steel. Or, 
again, if I simply called him a Puritan, it 
might mean something about nude statues or 
"prudes on the prowl." Or if I called him 
a Progressive, it might be supposed to mean 
that he votes for Progressives at the County 
Council election, which I very much doubt. 
I have no other course but this: of briefly 
explaining such matters as Shaw himself might 
explain them. Some fastidious persons may 
object to my thus putting the moral in front 
of the fable. Some may imagine in their 
innocence that they already understand the 
word Puritan or the yet more mysterious 



The Problem of a Preface 



word Irishman. The only person, indeed, 
of whose approval I feel fairly certain is 
Mr. Bernard Shaw himself, the man of many 
introductions. 



II 



CONTENTS 



Page 

Introduction to thk Firsi Edition .... 5 

The Problkm of a I'refacf. 7 

The Irishman 17 

The Puritan 34 

The Progressive 53 

The Critic 87 

The Dramatist ii8 

The Philosopher 171 



13 



GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 



GEORGE BERNARD 

: : SHAW : : 

The Irishman 



THE English public has commonly 
professed, with a kind of pride, 
that it cannot understand Mr. 
Bernard Shaw. There are many 
reasons for it which ought to be adequately 
considered in such a book as this. But the 
first and most obvious reason is the mere 
statement that George Bernard Shaw was born 
in Dublin in 1856. At least one reason why 
Englishmen cannot understand Mr. Shaw is 
that Englishmen have never taken the trouble 
to understand Irishmen. They will some- 
times be generous to Ireland; but never just 
to Ireland. They will speak to Ireland; they 
will speak for Ireland; but they will not hear 
Ireland speak. All the real amiability which 
most Englishmen undoubtedly feel towards 
Irishman is lavished upon a class of Irishmen 
which unfortunately does not exist. The 
B 17 



George Bernard Shaw 



Irishman of the English farce, with his brogue, 
his buoyancy, and his tender-hearted irrespon- 
sibiHty, is a man who ought to have been 
thoroughly pampered with praise and sym- 
pathy, if he had onlv existed to receive them. 
Unfortunately, all the time that we were 
creating a comic Irishman in fiction, we were 
creating a tragic Irishman in fact. Never 
perhaps has there been a situation of such 
excruciating cross-purposes even in the three- 
act farce. The more we saw in the Irishman a 
sort of warm and weak fidelity, the more he 
regarded us with a sort of icy anger. The 
more the oppressor looked down with an 
amiable pity, the more did the oppressed look 
down with a somewhat unamiable contempt. 
But, indeed, it is needless to say that such 
comic cross-purposes could be put into a 
\)\-a\\ they have been put into a play. They 
have been put into what is perhaps the most 
rtal of Mr. Bernard Shaw's plays, John Bull's 
othrr I slaiid. 

It IS somewhat absurd to imagine that anj^ 
one who has not read a play by Mr. Shaw will 
be reading a book about him. But if it comes 
to that It is (as I clearly perceive) absurd to 
be writing a book about Mr. Bernard Shaw at 
all. It is indefensibly foolish to attempt to 
i8 



The Irishman 



explain a man whose whole object through life 
has been to explain himself. But even in non- 
sense there is a need for logic and consistency; 
therefore let us proceed on the assumption 
that when I say that all Mr. Shaw's blood and 
oris;in may be found in 'John BuIFs other Islaml, 
some reader may answer that he does not 
know the play. Besides, it is more important 
to put the reader right about England and 
Ireland even than to put him right about 
Shaw. If he reminds me that this is a book 
about Shaw, I can only assure him that I will 
reasonably, and at proper intervals, remember 
the fact. 

Mr. Shaw himself said once, " I am a typical 
Irishman; my family came from Yorkshire." 
Scarcely anyone but a typical Irishman could 
have made the remark. It is in fact a bull, a 
conscious bull. A bull is only a paradox 
which people are too stupid to understand. It 
is the rapid summary of something which is at 
once so true and so complex that the speaker 
who has the swift intelligence to perceive it, 
has not the slow patience to explain it. Mys- 
tical dogmas are much of this kind. Dog- 
mas are often spoken of as if they were signs 
of the slowness or endurance of the human 
mind. As a matter of fact, they are marks of 

19 



George Bernard Shaw 



mental promptitude and lucid impatience. A 
man will put his meaning mystically because 
he cannot waste time in putting it rationally. 
Dogmas are not dark and mysterious; rather 
a dogma is like a flash of lightning — an instan- 
taneous lucidity that opens across a w^hole 
landscape. Of the same nature are Irish bulls; 
they are summaries which are too true to be 
consistent. The Irish make Irish bulls for the 
same reason that they accept Papal bulls. It is 
because it is better to speak wisdom foolishly, 
like the Saints, rather than to speak follv 
wisely, like the Dons. 

This is the truth about mystical dogmas 
:ind the truth about Irish bulls; it is also the 
truth about the paradoxes of Bernard Shaw. 
Kach of them is an argument impatiently 
shortened into an epigram. Each of them 
represents a truth hammered and hardened, 
with an almost disdainful violence until it is 
compressed mto a small space, until it is made 
brief and almost incomprehensible. The case 
of that curt remark about Ireland and York- 
shire is a very typical one. If Mr. Shaw had 
really attempted to set out all the sensible 
stages of his joke, the sentence would have 
run something like this: "That I am an 
Irishman is a fact of psychology which I can 



The Irishman 



trace in man}^ of the things that come out of 
me, my fastidiousness, my frigid fierceness 
and my distrust of mere pleasure. But the 
thing must be tested by what comes from me; 
do not try on me the dodge of asking where 
I came from, how many batches of three hun- 
dred and sixty-five days my family was in 
Ireland. Do not play any games on me about 
whether I am a Celt, a word that is dim to the 
anthropologist and utterly unmeaning to any- 
body else. Do not start any drivelling dis- 
cussions about whether the word Shaw is 
German or Scandinavian or Iberian or Basque. 
You know you are human; I know I am 
Irish. I know I belong to a certain type and 
temper of society; and I know that all sorts 
of people of all sorts of blood live in that 
society and by that society; and are therefore 
Irish. You can take your books of anthro- 
pology to hell or to Oxford." Thus gently, 
elaborately and at length, Mr. Shaw would 
have explained his meaning, if he had thought 
it worth his while. As he did not he merely 
flung the symbolic, but very complete sentence, 
"I am a typical Irishman; my family came 
from Yorkshire." 

What then is the colour of this Irish societv 
of which Bernard Shaw, with all his individual 



George Bernard Shaw 



oddity, is yet an essential type ? One generali- 
sation, I think, may at least be made. Ireland 
has in it a quality which caused it (in the most 
ascetic age of Christianity) to be called the 
"Land of Saints"; and which still might give 
it a claim to be called the Land of Virgins. 
An Irish Catholic priest once said to me, 
"There is in our people a fear of the passions 
which is older even than Christianity." Every- 
one who has read Shaw's play upon Ireland 
will remember the thino; in the horror of the 
Irish girl at being kissed in the public streets. 
But anyone who knows Shaw's work v^ill 
recognize it in Shaw himself. There exists 
by accident an early and beardless portrait of 
him which really suggests in the severity and 
purity of its lines some of the early ascetic 
pictures of the beardless Christ. However he 
may shout profanities or seek to shatter the 
shrines, there is always something about him 
which suggests that in a sweeter and more 
solid civilisation he would have been a great 
saint. He would have been a saint of a sternly 
ascetic, perhaps of a sternly negative type. 
But he has this strange note of the saint in 
him: that he is literally unworldly. Worldli- 
ness has no human magic for him; he is not 
bewitched by rank nor drawn on by conviviality 



. The Irishman 



at all. He could not understand the intel- 
lectural surrender of the snob. He is perhaps 
a detective character; but he is not a mixed 
one. All the virtues he has are heroic virtues. 
Shaw is like the Venus of Milo; all that there 
is of him is admirable. 

But in any case this Irish innocence is 
peculiar and fundamental in him; and strange 
as it may sound, I think that his innocence has 
a great deal to do with his suggestions of 
sexual revolution. Such a man is comparatively 
audacious in theory because he is comparatively 
clean in thought. Powerful men who have 
jiowerful passions use much of their strength 
m forging chains for themselves; they alone 
know how strong the chains need to be. But 
there are other souls who walk the woods like 
Diana, with a sort of wild chastity. I confess 
I think that this Irish purity a little disables a 
critic in dealing, as Mr. Shaw has dealt, with 
the roots and reality of the marriage law. 
He forgets that those fierce and elementary 
functions which drive the universe have an 
impetus which goes beyond itself and cannot 
always easily be recovered. So the healthiest 
men may often erect a law to watch them, 
)ust as the healthiest sleepers may want an 
alarum clock to wake them up. However 

2.S 



George Bernard Shaw 



this may be, Bernard Shaw certainly has all 
the virtues and all the powers that go with this 
original quality in Ireland. One of them is a 
sort of awful elegance; a dangerous and some- 
what inhuman daintiness of taste which some- 
rimes seems to shrink from matter itself, as 
though it were mud. Of the many sincere 
things Mr. Shaw has said he never said 
a more sincere one than when he stated he 
was a vegetarian, not because eating meat 
was bad morality, but because it was bad taste. 
It would be fanciful to say that Mr. Shaw is a 
vegetarian because he comes of a race of 
vegetarians, of peasants who are compelled to 
accept the simple life in the shape of potatoes. 
But I am sure that his fierce fastidiousness in 
such matters is one of the allotropic forms of 
the Irish purity; it is to the virtue of Father 
Matthew what a coal is to a diamond. It has, 
of course, the quality common to all special 
and unbalanced types of virtue, that you never 
know where it will stop. I can feel what Mr. 
Shaw probably means when he says that it is 
disgusting to feast off dead bodies, or to cut 
lumps off what was once a living thins;. Bur 
1 can never know at what moment he may not 
feel in the same way that it is disgusting to 
mutilate a pear-tree, or to root out of the 

24 



The Irishman 



earth those miserable mandrakes which cannot 
even groan. There is no natural limit to this 
rush and riotous gallop of rehnement. 

But it is not this physical and fantasric 
purity which I should chiefly count among the 
legacies of the old Irish morality. A much 
more important gift is that which all the saints- 
declared to be the reward of chastity: a queer 
clearness of the intellect, like the hard clear- 
ness of a crystal. This certainly Mr. Shaw 
possesses; in such degree that at certain times 
the hardness seems rather clearer than the 
clearness. But so it does in all the most typical 
Irish characters and Irish attitudes of mind. 
This is probably why Irishmen succeed so 
much in such professions as require a certain 
ciystalline realism, especially about results. 
Such professions are the soldier and the law- 
yer; these give ample opportunity for crimes 
but not much for mere illusions. If you have 
composed a bad opera you may persuade your- 
self that it is a good one; if you have carved 
a bad statue you can think yourself better than 
Michael Angelo. But if you have lost a battle 
you cannot believe you have won it; if your 
client is hanged you cannot pretend that you 
have got him off. 

There must be some sense in every popular 

25 



George Bernard Shaiv 



prejudice, even about foreigners. And the 
English people certainly have somehow got an 
impression and a tradition that the Irishman 
is genial, unreasonable, and sentimental. This 
legend of the tender, irresponsible Paddy has 
two roots; there are two elements in the Irish 
which made the mistake possible. First, the 
very logic of the Irishman makes hmi regard 
war or revolution as extra-logical, an ultima 
ratio which is beyond reason. When fighting 
a powerful enemy he no more worries whether 
all his charges are exact or all his attitudes 
dignified than a soldier worries whether a 
cannon-ball is shapel}^ or a plan of campaign 
picturesque. He is aggressive; he attacks. 
He seems merely to be rowdy in Ireland 
when he is really carrying the war into Africa 
— or England. A Dublin tradesman printed 
his name and trade in archaic Erse on his 
cart. He knew that hardly anybody could 
read it; he did it to annoy. In his position 
1 think he was quite right. When one is 
oppressed it is a mark of chivalry to hurt 
oneself in order to hurt the oppressor. But 
the English (never having had a real revolu- 
tion since the Middle Ages) find it very hard 
to understand this steady passion for being a 
nuisance, and mistake it for mere whimsical 
26 



The Irishman 



inipulsi\enes.s and follv. When an Irish 
tnemher holds up the whole business o\ the 
House of Commons by talking of his bleed- 
ing country for five or six hours, the simple 
English members suppose that he is a senti- 
mentalist. The truth is that he is a scornful 
realist who alone remains unaffected by the 
sentimentalism of the House of Commons. 
The Irishman is neither poet enough nor 
snob enough to be swept away by those 
smooth social and historical tides and tenden- 
cies which carry Radicals and Labour members 
comfortably off their feet. He goes on asking 
for a thing because he wants it; and he tries 
really to hurt his enemies because they are his 
enemies. This is the first of the queer con- 
fusions which make the hard Irishman look 
soft. He seems to us wild and unreasonable 
because he is really much too reasonable to be 
anything but fierce when he is fighting. 

In all this it will not be difficult to see the 
Irishman in Bernard Shaw. Though person- 
ally one of the kindest men in the world, 
he has often written really in order to hurt; 
not because he hated any particular men (he is 
hardly hot and animal enough for that), but 
because he really hated certain ideas even 
unto slaying. He provokes; he will not let 

27 



George Bernard Shaw 



people alone. One might even say that he 
bullies, only that this would be unfair, because 
he always wishes the other man to hit back. 
At least he always challenges, like a true 
Green Islander. An even stronger instance of 
this national trait can be found in another 
eminent Irishman, Oscar Wilde. His philos- 
ophy (which was vile) was a philosophy of 
ease, of acceptance, and luxurious illusion; 
yet, being Irish, he could not help putting 
it in pugnacious and propagandist epigrams. 
He preached his softness with hard decision; 
he praised pleasure in the words most calcu- 
lated to give pain. This armed insolence, 
which was the noblest thing about him, was 
also the Irish thing; he challenged all comers. 
It is a good instance of how right popular 
tradition is even when it is most wrong, that 
the English have perceived and preserved this 
essential trait of Ireland in a proverbial phrase. 
It IS true that the Irishman says, "^^^^o will 
tread on the tail of my coat V 

But there is a second cause which creates 
the English fallacy that the Irish are weak and 
emotional. This again springs from the very 
fact that the Irish are lucid and logical. For 
being logical they strictly separate poetry from 
prose; and as in prose they are strictly pro- 

28 



Tlie Irishman 



saic, so in poetry they are purely poetical. In 
this, as in one or two other things, they re- 
semble the French, who make their gardens 
beautiful because they are gardens, but their 
fields ugly because they are only fields. An 
Irishman may like romance, but he will say, 
to use a frequent Shavian phrase, that it is 
"only romance." A great part of the English 
energy in fiction arises from the very fact that 
their fiction half deceives them. If Rudyard 
Kipling, for instance, had written his short 
stories in France, they would have been 
praised as cool, clever little works of art, 
rather cruel, and very nervous and feminine; 
Kipling's short storres would have been ap- 
preciated like Maupassant's short stories. In 
England they were not appreciated but be- 
lieved. They were taken seriously by a 
startled nation as a true picture of the empire 
and the universe. Tne English people made 
haste to abandon England in favour of Mr. 
Kipling and his imaginary colonies; they 
made haste to abandon Christianity in favour 
ot Mr. Kipling's rather morbid version of 
Judaism. Such a moral boom of a book 
would be almost impossible in Ireland, be- 
cause the Irish mind distinguishes between 
hfe and literature. Mr. Bernard Shaw him- 

29 



George Bernard Shaw 



self summed this up as he sums up so 
many things in a compact sentence which he 
uttered in conversation with the present 
writer, "An Irishman has two eyes." He 
meant that with one eye an Irishman saw that 
a dream was inspiring, bewitching, or sublime, 
and with the other eye that after all it was a 
dream. Both the humour and the sentiment 
of an Englishman cause him to wink the other 
eye. Two other small examples will illustrate 
the English mistake. Take, for instance, that 
noble survival from a nobler age of politics — 
1 mean Irish oratory. 1 he English imagine 
that Irish politicians are so hot-headed and 
poetical that they have to pour out a torrent 
of burning words. The truth is that the 
Irish are so clear-headed and critical that thev 
still regard rhetoric as a distinct art, as the 
ancients did. Thus a man makes a speech as 
a man plays a violin, not necessarily without 
leeling, but chiefly because he knows how to 
do it. Another instance of the same thing is 
that quality which is always called the Irish 
charm. The Irish are agreeable, not because 
they are particularly emotional, but because thev 
are very highly civilised. Blarney is a ritual; 
as much of a ritual as kissing the Blarney Stone. 
Lastly, there is one general truth about 



30 



The Irishman 



Ircl.'ind which may very well have influenced 
Bernard Shaw from the first; and ahnost 
certainly mfluenced him for good. Ireland is 
a country in which the political conflicts are at 
least genuine; they are about something. 
They are about patriotism, about religion, or 
about money: the three great realities. In 
other words, they are concerned with what 
commonwealth a man lives in or with what 
universe a man lives in or with how he is to 
manage to live in either. But they are not 
concerned with which of two wealthy cousins 
in the same governino; class shall be allo\^ed 
to bring in the same Parish Councils Bill; 
there is no party system in Ireland. The party 
system in England is an enormous and most 
efficient machine for preventing political con- 
flicts. The party system is arranged on the 
same principle as a three-legged race: the 
principle that union is not always strength and 
is never activity. Nobody asks for what he 
really wants. But in Ireland the loyalist is 
lust as ready to throw over the King as the 
Fenian to throw over Mr. Gladstone; each 
will throw over anything except the thing that 
he wants. Hence it happens that even the 
lollies or the frauds of Irish politics are more 
genuine as symptoms and more honourable as 

31 



George Bernard Shaw 



symbols than the lumbering hypocrisies of the 
prosperous Parliamentarian. The very lies of 
Dublin and Belfast are truer than the truisms 
of Westminster. They have an object; they 
refer to a state of things. There was more 
honesty, in the sense of actuality, about 
Piggott's letters than about the Times' leading 
articles on them. When Parnell said calmly 
before the Royal Commission that he had 
made a certain remark "in order to mislead 
the House" he proved himself to be one of 
the few truthful men of his time. An ordinary 
British statesman would never have made the 
confession, because he would have grown quite 
accustomed to committing the crime. The 
party system itself implies a habit of stating 
something other than the actual truth. A 
Leader of the House means a Misleader of 
the House. 

Bernard Shaw was born outside all this; 
and he carries that freedom upon his face. 
Whether what he heard in boyhood was 
violent Nationalism or virulent Unionism, it 
was at least something which wanted a certain 
principle to be in force, not a certain clique to be 
in office. Of him the great Gilbertian general- 
isation is untrue; he vi'as not born either a 
little Liberal or else a little Conservative. He 

32 



The Irishman 



did not, like most of us, pass through the 
stage of being a good party man on his way to 
the difficult business of being a good man. 
He came to stare at our general elections as a 
Red Indian might stare at the Oxford and 
Cambridge boat-race, blind to all its irrelevant 
sentimentalities and to some of its legitimate 
sentiments. Bernard Shaw entered England 
as an alien, as an invader, as a conqueror. In 
other words, he entered England as an Irish- 
man. 



^i 



The Puritan 



IT has been said in the first section that 
Bernard Shaw draws from his own nation 
two unquestionable quahties, a kind of 
intellectual chastity, and the fit^htinp; 
spirit. He is so much of an idealist about his 
ideals that he can be a ruthless realist in his 
methods. His soul has (in short) the virginity 
and the violence of Ireland. But Bernard 
Shaw is not merely an Irishman; he is not 
even a typical one. He is a certain separated 
and pecuHar kind of Irishman, which is not 
easy to describe. Some Nationalist Irishmen 
have referred to him contemptuously as a 
"West Briton." But this is really unfair; 
for whatever Mr. Shaw's mental faults may be, 
the easy adoption of an unmeaning phrase 
like "Briton" is certainly not one of them. 
It would be much nearer the truth to put the 
thing in the bold and bald terms of the old 
Irish song, and to call him "The anti-Irish 
Irishman." But it is only fair to say that the 
description is far less of a monstrosity than 
the anti-English Englishman would be; be- 
cause the Irish are so much stronger in self- 
criticism. Compared with the constant self- 

34 



The Puritan 



flattery of tlie English, nearly every Irishman 
is an anti-Irish Irishman. But here again 
popular phraseology hits the right word. This 
fairly educated and fairly wealthy Protestant 
wedge which is driven into the country at 
Dublin and elsewhere is a thing not easv 
superficially to summarise in any term. It 
cannot be described merely as a minority; for 
a minority means the part of a nation which is 
conquered. But this thing means something 
that conquers, and is not entirely part of a 
nation. Nor can one even fall back on the 
phrase of aristocracy. For an aristocracy 
implies at least some chorus of snobbish en- 
thusiasm; it implies that some at least are 
willingly led by the leaders, if only towards 
vulgarity and vice. There is only one word 
for the minority in Ireland, and that is the 
word that public phraseology has found; I 
mean the word "Garrison." The Irish are 
essentially right when they talk as if all 
Protestant Unionists lived inside "The Castle." 
They have all the virtues and limitations 
of a literal garrison in a fort. That is, 
they are valiant, consistent, reliable in an 
obvious public sense; but their curse is that 
they can only tread the flagstones of the court- 
yard or the cold rock of the ramparts; they 

35 



George Bernard Shaw 



have never so much as set their foot upon 
their native soil. 

We have considered Bernard Shaw as an 
Irishman. The next step is to consider him 
as an exile from Ireland livmg in Ireland; 
that, some people would say, is a paradox 
after his own heart. But, indeed, such a 
complication is not really difficult to expound. 
The great religion and the great national 
tradition which have persisted for so many 
centuries in Ireland have encouraged these 
clean and cutting elements; but they have 
encouraged many other things which serve to 
balance them. The Irish peasant has these 
qualities which are somewhat peculiar to Ire- 
land, a strange purity and a strange pugnacity. 
But the Irish peasant also has qualities which 
are common to all peasants, and his nation 
has qualities that are common to all healthy 
nations. I mean chiefly the things that most 
of us absorb m childhood; especially the sense 
of the supernatural and the sense of the 
natural; the love of the sky with its infinity 
of vision, and the love of the soil with its 
strict hedges and solid shapes of ownership. 
But here comes the paradox of Shaw; the 
greatest of all his paradoxes and the one of 
which he is unconscious. These one or two 



36 



The Puritan 



plain truths which quite stupid people learn 
at the beginning are exactly the one or tNvo 
truths which Bernard Shaw may not learn 
even at the end. He is a daring pilgrim who 
has set out from the grave to find the cradle. 
He started from points of view which no one 
else was clever enough to discover, and he is 
at last discovering points of view which no 
one else was ever stupid enough to ignore. 
This absence of the red-hot truisms of boy- 
hood; this sense that he is not rooted in the 
ancient sagacities of infancy, has, I think, a 
great deal to do with his position as a member 
of an alien minority in Ireland. He who has 
no real country can have no real home. The 
average autochthonous Irishman is close to 
patriotism because he is close to the earth; 
he IS close to domesticity because he is close 
to the earth; he is close to doctrinal theology 
and elaborate ritual because he is close to the 
earth. In short, he is close to the heavens 
because he is close to the earth. But we must 
not expect any of these elemental and collective 
virtues in the man of the garrison. He can- 
not be expected to exhibit the virtues of a 
people, but only (as Ibsen would say) of an 
enemy of the people. Mr. Shaw has no living 
traditions, no schoolboy tricks, no colleo;e cus- 



George Bernard Shaw 



toms, to link him with other men. Nothing 
about him can be supposed to refer to a 
family feud or to a family joke. He does not 
drink toasts; he does not keep anniversaries; 
musical as he is I doubt if he would consent 
to sing. All this has something in it of a 
tree with its roots in the air. The best way 
to shorten winter is to prolong Christmas; 
and the only way to enjoy the sun of April is 
to be an April Fool. When people asked 
Bernard Shaw to attend the Stratford Ter- 
centenary, he wrote back with characteristic 
contempt: "I do not keep my own birthday, 
and I cannot see why I should keep Shake- 
speare's." I think that if Mr. Shaw had 
always kept his own birthday he would be 
better able to understand Shakespeare's birth- 
day — and Shakespeare's poetry. 

In conjecturally referring this negative side 
of the man, his lack of the smaller charities of 
our common childhood, to his birth in the 
dominant Irish sect, I do not write without 
historic memory or reference to other cases. 
That minority of Protestant exiles which 
mainly represented Ireland to England during 
the eighteenth century did contain some speci- 
mens of the Irish lounger and even of the 
Irish blackguard; Sheridan and even Gold- 



38 



The Puritan 



smith suggest the type. Even in their irre- 
sponsibility these figures had a touch of Irish 
tartness and reaHsm; but the t3/pe has been 
too much insisted on to the exclusion ot 
others equally national and interesting. To 
one of these it is worth while to draw atten- 
tion. At intervals during the eighteenth and 
nineteenth centuries there has appeared a 
peculiar kind of Irishman. He is so unlike 
the Eno-lish imao-e of Ireland that the English 
have actually fallen back on the pi-etence that 
he was not Irish at all. The type is com- 
monly Protestant; and sometimes seems to 
be almost anti-national in its acrid instinct for 
judging itself. Its nationalism only appears 
when it flings itself with even bitterer pleas- 
ure into judging the foreigner or the invader. 
The first and greatest of such figures was 
Swift. Thackeray simply denied that Swift 
was an Irishman, because he was not a stage 
Irishman. He was not (in the English 
novelist's opinion) winning and agreeable 
enough to be Irish. The truth is that Swift 
was much too harsh and disagreeable to be 
English. There is a great deal of Jonathan 
Swift in Bernard Shaw. Shaw is like Swift, 
for instance, in combining extravagant fancy 
with a curious sort of coldness. But he is 



39 



George Bernard Shaw 



most like Swift in that very quality which 
Thackeray said was impossible in an Irish- 
man, benevolent bullying, a pity touched with 
contempt, and a habit of knocking men down 
for their own good. Characters in novels are 
often described as so amiable that they hate 
to be thanked. It is not an amiable quality, 
and it is an extremely rare one; but Swift 
possessed it. When Swift was buried the 
Dublin poor came in crowds and wept by 
the grave of the broadest and most free- 
handed of their benefactors. Swift deserved 
the public tribute; but he might have writhed 
and kicked in his grave at the thought of 
receiving it. There is in G. B. S. some- 
thing of the same inhumane humanity. Irish 
history has offered a third instance of this 
particular tj^pe of educated and Protestant 
Irishman, sincere, unsympathetic, aggressive, 
alone. I mean Parnell; and with him also 
a bewildered England tried the desperate 
dodge of saying that he was not Irish at all. 
As if any thinkable sensible snobbish law- 
abiding Englishman would ever have defied 
all the drawing-rooms by disdaining the 
House of Commons! Despite the differ- 
ence between taciturnity and a torrent of 
fluency there is much in common also be- 

40 



The Puritan 



tween Shaw and Parnell; something in com- 
mon even in the figures of the two men, 
in the bony bearded faces with their ahnost 
Satanic self-possession. It will not do to 
pretend that none of these three men belong 
to their own nation; but it is true that they 
belonged to one special, though recurring, 
type of that nation. And they all three have 
this peculiar mark, that while Nationalists in 
their various ways they all give to the more 
genial English one common impression; I 
mean the impression that they do not so 
much love Ireland as hate England. 

I will not dogmatise upon the difficult ques- 
tion as to whether there is any religious sig- 
nificance in the fact that these three rather 
ruthless Irishmen were Protestant Irishmen. I 
incline to think myself that the Catholic Church 
has added charity and gentleness to the virtues 
ol a people which would otherwise have been 
too keen and contemptuous, too aristocratic. 
But however this may be, there can surely be 
no question that Bernard Shaw's Protestant 
education in a Catholic country has made a 
great deal of difference to his mind. It has 
affected it in two ways, the first negative and 
the second positive. It has affected him by 
cutting him off (as we have said) from the 

41 



George Beniard Shaw 



fields and fountains of his real home and his- 
tory; by making him an Orangeman. And 
it has affected him by the particular colour of 
the particular religion which he received; by 
making him a Puritan. 

In one of his numerous prefaces he says, 
"I have always been on the side of the 
Puritans in the matter of Art"; and a closer 
study will, I think, reveal that he is on the 
side of the Puritans in almost everything. 
Puritanism was not a mere code of cruel 
regulations, though some of its regulations 
were more cruel than any that have disgraced 
Europe. Nor was Puritanism a mere night- 
mare, an evil shadow of eastern gloom and 
fatalism, though this element did enter it, and 
was as it were the symptom and punishment 
of its essential error. Something much nobler 
(even if almost equally mistaken) was the 
original energy in the Puritan creed. And it 
must be defined with a little more delicacy if 
we are really to understand the attitude of 
G. B. S., who is the greatest of the modern 
Puritans and perhaps the last. 

I should roughly define the first spirit in 
Puritanism thus. It was a refusal to contem- 
plate God or goodness with anything lighter 
or milder than the most fierce concentration 

42 



The Puritan 



of the intellect. A Puritan meant originally 
a man whose mind had no holidays. To use 
his own favourite phrase, he would let no 
living thing come between him and his God; 
an attitude which involved eternal torture for 
him and a cruel contempt for all the living 
things. It was better to worship in a barn 
than in a cathedral for the specific and specified 
reason that the cathedral was beautiful. Physi- 
cal beauty was a false and sensual symbol 
coming in between the intellect and the object 
of its intellectual worship. The human brain 
ought to be at every instant a consuming fire 
which burns through all conventional images 
until they were as transparent as glass. 

This is the essential Puritan idea, that God 
can only be praised by direct contemplation 
of Him. You must praise God only with 
your brain; it is wicked to praise Him with 
vour passions or your physical habits or your 
gesture or instinct of beauty. Therefore it 
is wicked to worship by singing or dancing or 
drinking sacramental wines or building beauti- 
ful churches or saying prayers when you are 
half asleep. We must not worship by dancing, 
drinking, building or singing; we can only 
worship by thinking. Our heads can praise 
God, but never our hands and feet. That 

43 



George Bernard Shaw 



is the true and original impulse of the Puritans. 
There is a great deal to be said for it, and 
a great deal was said for it in Great Britain 
steadily for two hundred years. It has 
graduall)^ decayed in England and Scotland, 
not because of the advance of modern thought 
(which means nothing), but because of the 
slow revival of the mediaeval energy and 
character in the two peoples. The English 
were always hearty and humane, and they 
have made up their minds to be hearty and 
humane in spite of the Puritans. The result 
is that Dickens and W. W. Jacobs have 
picked up the tradition of Chaucer and Robin 
Hood. The Scotch were always romantic, and 
they have made up their minds to be romantic 
in spite of the Puritans. The result is that 
Scott and Stevenson have picked up the tradi- 
tion of Bruce, Blind Harry and the vagabond 
Scottish kings. England has become English 
again; Scotland has become Scottish again, in 
spite of the splendid incubus, the noble night- 
mare of Calvin. There is only one place in 
the British Islands where one may naturally 
expect to find still surviving in its fulness the 
fierce detachment of the true Puritan. That 
place is the Protestant part of Ireland. The 
Orange Calvinists can he disturbed by no 

44 



The Puritan 



national resurrection, for they have no nation. 
In them, if in any people, will be found the 
rectangular consistency of the Calvinist. The 
Irish Protestant rioters are at least immeasur- 
ably finer fellows than anv of their brethren 
in England. They have the two enormous 
superiorities: first, that the Irish Protestant 
rioters really believe in Protestant theology; 
and second, that the Irish Protestant rioters 
do really not. Among these people, if any- 
where, should be found the cult of theological 
clarity combmed with barbarous external 
simplicity. Among these people Bernard Shaw 
was born. 

There is at least one outstanding- fact about 
the man we are studying; Bernard Shaw is 
never frivolous. He never gives his opinions 
a holiday; he is never irresponsible even for 
an instant. He has no nonsensical second 
self which he can get into as one gets into a 
dressino--gown; that ridiculous disguise which 
is vet more real than the real person. That 
collapse and humorous confession of futility 
was much of the force in Charles Lamb and in 
Stevenson. There is nothing of this in Shaw; 
his wit IS never a weakness; therefore it is 
never a sense of humour. For wit is always 
connected with the idea that truth is close and 

45 



George Bernard Shaiv 



clear. Humour, on the other hand, is always 
connected with the idea that truth is tricky 
and mystical and easily mistaken. What 
Charles Lamb said of the Scotchman is far 
truer of this type of Puritan Irishman; he 
does not see things suddenly in a new light; 
all his brilliancy is a blindingly rapid calcula- 
tion and deduction. Bernard Shaw never said 
an indefensible thing; that is, he never said a 
thing that he was not prepared brilliantly to 
defend. He never breaks out into that cry 
beyond reason and conviction, that cry of 
Lamb when he cried, "We would indict our 
dreams!" or of Stevenson, "Shall we never 
shed blood ?" In short he is not a humorist, 
but a great wit, almost as great as Voltaire. 
Humour is akin to agnosticism, which is only 
the negative side of mysticism. But pure 
wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and 
painful consciousness of the final fact in the 
universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the 
consistency in things is a wit — and a Calvinist. 
The man who sees the inconsistency in things 
is a humourist — and a Catholic. However 
this may be, Bernard Shaw exhibits all that is 
purest in the Puritan; the desire to see truth 
face to face even if it slav us, the high im- 
patience with irrelevant sentiment or obstruc- 

46 



The Puritan 



ti\e symbol; the constant effort to keep the 
soul at its highest pressure and speed. His 
instincts upon all social customs and ques- 
tions are Puritan. His favourite author is 
Bunyan. 

But along with what was inspiring and direct 
in Puritanism Bernard Shaw has mhented also 
some of the things that were cumbersome and 
traditional. If ever Shaw exhibits a prejudice 
it is always a Puritan prejudice. For Puritan- 
ism has not been able to sustain through three 
centuries that native ecstasy of the direct con- 
templation of truth; indeed it was the whole 
mistake of Puritanism to imagine for a moment 
that it could. One cannot be serious for three 
hundred years. In institutions built so as to 
endure for ages you must have relaxation, 
symbolic relativity and healthy routine. In 
eternal temples you must have frivolity. You 
must "be at ease in Zion" unless \'ou are only 
pa}'mg It a flymg visit. 

By the middle of the nineteenth century 
this old austerity and actuality in the Puritan 
vision had fallen away into two principal lower 
forms. The first is a sort of idealistic gar- 
rulity upon which Bernard Shaw has made 
fierce and on the whole fruitful war. Per- 
petual talk about righteousness and unselfish- 

47 



George Bernard Shaw 



ness, about things that should elevate and 
things which cannot but degrade, about social 
purity and true Christian manhood, all poured 
out with fatal fluency and with very little 
reference to the real facts of anybody's soul or 
salary — into this weak and lukewarm torrent 
has melted down much of that mountainous 
ice which sparkled in the seventeenth centuiy, 
bleak indeed, but blazing. The hardest thing 
of the seventeenth century bids fair to be the 
softest thing of the twentieth. 

Of all this sentimental and deliquescent 
Puritanism Bernard Shaw has always been the 
antagonist; and the only respect in which it has 
soiled him was that he believed for only too 
long that such sloppy idealism was the whole 
idealism of Christendom and so used "ideal- 
ist" itself as a term of reproach. But there 
were other and negative effects of Puritanism 
which he did not escape so completely. I 
cannot think that he has wholly escaped that 
element in Puritanism which may fairly bear 
the title of the taboo. For it is a singular 
fact that although extreme Protestantism is 
dying in elaborate and over-refined civilisa- 
tion, yet it is the barbaric patches of it that live 
longest and die last. Of the creed of John 
Knox the modern Protestant has abandoned 



48 



The Puritan 



tlie ci\ilised part and retained only the savage 
part. He has given up that great and sys- 
tematic philosophy of Calvinism which had 
much in common with modern science and 
strongly resembles ordinary and recurrent de- 
terminisim. But he has retained the accidental 
veto upon cards or comic plays, which Knox 
only valued as mere proof of his people's 
concentration on their theology. All the awful 
but sublime affirmations of Puritan theology 
are gone. Only savage negations remain; 
such as that by which in Scotland on everv 
seventh day the creed of fear lays his finger 
on all hearts and makes an evil silence in 
the streets. 

Bv the middle of the nineteenth centurv 
when Shaw was born this dim and barbaric 
element in Puritanism, being all that remained 
of it, had added another taboo to its philosophy 
of taboos; there had grown up a mystical 
horror of those fermented drinks which are 
part of the food of civilised mankind. Doubt- 
less many persons take an extreme line on this 
matter solely because of some calculation of 
social harm; many, but not all and not even 
most. Many people think that paper money 
is a mistake and does much harm. But they 
do not shudder or snigger when they see a 

D 49 



George Bernard Shaw 



cheque-book. They do not whisper with 
unsavoury slyness that such and such a man 
was "seen" going into a bank. I am quite 
convinced that the English aristocracy is the 
curse of England, but I have not noticed either 
in myself or others any disposition to ostracise 
a man simply for accepting a peerage, as the 
modern Puritans would certainlv ostracise him 
(from any of their positions of trust) for 
accepting a -drink. The sentiment is certainlv 
very largely a mystical one, like the sentiment 
about the seventh day. Like the Sabbath, it 
is defended with sociological reasons; but 
those reasons can be simply and sharply tested. 
If a Puritan tells 3'ou that all humanity should 
rest once a week, you have only to propose 
that they should rest on Wednesday. And if 
a Puritan tells you that he does not object to 
beer but to the tragedies of excess in beer, 
simply propose to him that in prisons and 
workhouses (where the amount can be abso- 
lutely regulated) the inmates should have 
three glasses of beer a day. The Puritan 
cannot call that excess; but he will find some- 
thing to call it. For it is not the excess he 
objects to, but the beer. It is a transcendental 
taboo, and it is one of the two or three 
positive and painful prejudices with which 

.50 



The Puritan 



Bernard Shaw began. A similar severity ot 
outlook ran through all his earlier attitude 
towards the drama; especially towards the 
lighter or looser drama. His Puritan teachers 
could not prevent him from taking up theatri- 
cals, but they made him take theatricals 
seiiously. All his plays were indeed "plays 
for Puritans." All his criticisms quiver with 
a refined and almost tortured contempt for the 
indulgencies of ballet and burlesque, for the 
tights and the double entente. He can endure 
lawlessness but not levity. He is not repelled 
by the divorces and the adulteries as he is by 
the "splits." And he has always been fore- 
most among the fierce modern critics who ask 
indignantly, "Why do you object to a thing 
full of sincere philosophy like The Wild Duck 
while you tolerate a mere dirty joke like The 
Spring Chicken?''' I do not think he has ever 
understood what seems to me the very sensible 
answer of the man in the street, " I laugh at 
the dirty joke of The Spring Chicken because it 
is a joke. I criticise the philosophy of The 
Wild Duck because it is a philosophy." 

Shaw does not do justice to the democratic 
ease and sanity on this subject; but mdeed, 
whatever else he is, he is not democratic. As 
an Irishman he is an aristocrat, as a Calvinist 

51 



George Bernard Shaw 



he is a soul apart; he drew the breath of his 
nostrils from a land of fallen principalities and 
proud gentility, and the breath of his spirit 
from a creed which made a wall of crystal 
around the elect. Tlie two forces between 
them produced this potent and slender figure, 
swift, scornful, dainty and full of dry mag- 
nanimity; and it only needed the last touch 
of oligarchic mastery to be given by the over- 
whelming oligarchic atmosphere of our present 
age. Such was the Puritan Irishman who 
stepped out into the world. Into what kind 
of world did he step ? 



52 



The Progressive 



IT is now partly possible to justify the 
Shavian method of putting the explana- 
tions before the events. I can now give 
a fact or two with a partial certainty at 
least that the reader will give to the affairs of 
Bernard Shaw something of the same kind 
of significance which they have for Bernard 
Shaw himself. Thus, if I had simply said that 
Shaw was born in Dublin the average reader 
might exclaim, "Ah yes — a wild Irishman, 
gay, emotional and untrustw^orthy." The 
wrong note would be struck at the start. 
I have attempted to give some idea of w^hat 
being born in Ireland meant to the man who 
was really born there. Now therefore for the 
first time I may be permitted to confess that 
Bernard Shaw was, like other men, born. He 
was born in Dublin on the 26th of July, 1856. 
just as his birth can only be appreciated 
through some vision of Ireland, so his family 
can only be appreciated by some realisation ot 
the Puritan. He was the youngest son of one 
George Carr Shaw, who had been a civil servant 
and was afterwards a somewhat unsuccessful 



5.^ 



George Bernard Shaw 



business man. If I had merely said that his 
family was Protestant (which in Ireland means 
Puritan) it might have been passed over as a 
quite colourless detail. But if the reader will 
keep in mind what has been said about the 
degeneration of Calvinism into a few clumsy 
vetoes, he will see in its full and frightful sig- 
nificance such a sentence as this which comes 
from Shaw himself: " My father was in theory 
a vehement teetotaler, but in practice often a 
furtive drinker." The two things of course 
rest upon exactly the same philosophy; the 
philosophy of the taboo. There is a mystical 
substance, and it can give monstrous pleasures 
or call down monstrous punishments. The 
dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both 
mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. 
They both regard wine as a drug and not as a 
drink. But if I had mentioned that fragment ot 
family information without any ethical preface, 
people would have begun at once to talk non- 
sense about artistic heredity and Celtic weak- 
ness, and would have gained the general 
impression that Bernard Shaw was an Irish 
wastrel and the child of Irish wastrels. 
Whereas it is the whole point of the matter 
that Bernard Shaw comes of a Puritan middle- 
class family of the most solid respectability; 

54 



The Progressive 



and the only admission of error arises from 
the fact that one member of that Puritan 
family took a particularly Puritan view of 
strong drink. That is, he regarded it generally 
as a poison and sometimes as a medicine, if 
only a mental medicine. But a poison and a 
medicine are very closely akin, as the nearest 
chemist knows; and they are chiefly akin in 
this; that no one will drink either of them 
for fun. Moreover, medicine and a poison are 
also alike in this; that no one will by preference 
drink either of them in public. And this 
medical or poisonous view of alcohol is not 
confined to the one Puritan to whose failure 
I have referred, it is spread all over the whole 
of our dying Puritan civilisation. For instance, 
social reformers have fired a hundred shots 
against the public-house; but never one 
against its really shameful feature. The sign 
of decay is not in the public-house, but in the 
private bar; or rather the row of five or six 
private bars, into each of which a respectable 
dipsomaniac can go in solitude, and by indulg- 
ing his own half-witted sin violate his own 
half-witted morality. Nearly all these places 
are equipped with an atrocious apparatus ot 
ground-glass windows which can be so closed 
that they practically conceal the face of the 

55 



George Bernard Shaw 



buyer from the seller. Words cannot express 
the abysses of human infamy and hateful 
shame expressed by that elaborate piece of 
furniture. Whenever I go into a public-house, 
which happens fairly often, I always carefully 
open all these apertures and then leave the place, 
in every way refreshed. 

In other ways also it is necessary to insist 
not only on the fact of an extreme Protestant- 
ism, but on that of the Protestantism of a 
garrison; a world where that religious force 
both grew and festered all the more for 
being at once isolated and protected. All the 
influences surrounding Bernard Shaw in boy- 
hood were not only Puritan, but such that 
no non-Puritan force could possibly pierce or 
counteract. He belonged to that Irish group 
which, according to Catholicism, has hardened 
its heart, which, according to Protestantism 
has hardened its head, but w^hich, as I fancy, 
has chiefly hardened its hide, lost its sensibility 
to the contact of the things around it. In 
reading about his youth, one forgets that it 
was passed in the island which is still one 
flame before the altar of St. Peter and St. 
Patrick. The whole thing might be happening 
in Wimbledon. He went to the Wesleyan 
Connexional School. He went to hear Moody 

.56 



llic Progressive 



rmd Sankey. "I was," he writes, "wliolh' 
unmoved bv their eloquence; and felt bound 
to inform the public that I was, on the whole, 
an atheist. My letter was solemnly printed 
in Piihhc Opinion, to the extreme horror of 
mv numerous aunts and uncles." That is 
the philosophical atmosphere; those are the 
religious postulates. It could never cross 
the mind of a man of the Garrison that before 
becomino; an atheist he might stroll into one 
of the churches of his own country, and learn 
something of the philosophy that had satisfied 
Dante and Bossuet, Pascal and Descartes. 

In the same way I have to appeal to my theo- 
retic preface at this third point of the drama of 
Shaw's career. On leaving school he stepped 
into a secure business position which he held 
steadily for four years and which he flung 
away almost in one day. He rushed even 
recklessly to London; where he was quite 
unsuccessful and practically starved for six 
years. If I had mentioned this act on the first 
page of this book it would have seemed to have 
either the simplicity of a mere fanatic or 
else to cover some ugly escapade of youth or 
some quite criminal looseness of temperament. 
But Bernard Shaw did not act thus because he 
was careless, but because he was ferociously 

57 



George Bernard Shaw 



careful, careful especially of the one thing; 
needful. What was he thinking about when 
he threw away his last halfpence and went to 
a strange place; what was he thinking about 
when he endured hunger and small-pox in 
London almost without hope r He was think- 
ing of what he has ever since thought of, the 
slow but sure surge of the social revolution; 
you must read into all those bald sentences 
and empty years what I shall attempt to 
sketch in the third section. You must read 
the revolutionary movement of the later nine- 
teenth century, darkened indeed by materialism 
and made mutable by fear and free thought, 
but full of awful vistas of an escape from the 
curse of Adam. 

Bernard Shaw happened to be born in an 
epoch, or rather at the end of an epoch, which 
was in its way unique in the ages of history. 
The nineteenth century was not unique in the 
success or rapidity of its reforms or m their 
ultimate cessation; but it was unique in the 
peculiar character of the failure which followed 
the success. The French Revolution was an 
enormous act of human realisation; it has 
altered the terms of every law and the shape 
of every town in Europe; but it was by no 
means the only example of a strong and swift 



The Progressive 



l^criod of reform. What was really peculiar 
about the Republican energy was this, that it 
left behind it, not an ordinary reaction but a 
kind of dreary, drawn out and utterly un- 
meaning hope. The strong and evident idea 
of reform sank lower and lower until it became 
the timid and feeble idea of progress. Towards 
the end of the nineteenth century there appeared 
its two incredible figures; they were the pure 
Conservative and the pure Progressive; two 
figures which would have been overwhelmed 
with laughter by any other intellectual common- 
wealth of history. There was hardly a human 
generation which could not have seen the folly 
of merely going forward or merely standing 
still; of mere progressing or mere conserving. 
In the coarsest Greek Comedy we might have 
a joke about a man who wanted to keep what 
he had, whether it was yellow gold or yellow 
fever. In the dullest mediaeval morality we 
might have a joke about a progressive gentle- 
man who, having passed heaven and come 
to purgatory, decided to go further and fare 
worse. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries 
were an age of quite impetuous progress; men 
made in one rush, roads, trades, synthetic phi- 
losophies, parliaments, university settlements, 
a law that could cover the world and such 

•^9 



George Bernard Shaw 



spires as had never struck the sky. But they 
would not have said that they wanted progress, 
but that they wanted the road, the parHaments, 
and the spires. In the same way the time 
from Richeheu to the Revolution was upon the 
whole a time of conservation, often of harsh 
and hideous conservation; it preserved tor- 
tures, legal quibbles, and despotism. But ii you 
had asked the rulers they would not have said 
that thev wanted conservation; but that they 
wanted the torture and the despotism. The 
old reformers and the old despots alike desired 
definite things, powers, licenses, payments, 
vetoes, and permissions. Only the modern 
progressive and the modern conservati^'e ha\e 
been content with two words. 

Other periods of active improvement have 
died by stiffening at last into some routine. 
Thus the Gothic gaiety of the thirteenth 
century stiffening into the mere Gothic uo;li- 
ness of the fifteenth. Tluis the mighty wave 
of the Renaissance, whose crest was lifted to 
heaven, was touched by a wintry witchery of 
classicism and frozen for ever before it fell. 
Alone of all such movements the democratic 
movement of the last two centuries has not 
frozen, but loosened and liquefied. Instead of 
becoming more pedantic in its old age, it has 

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o;rown more bewildered. By the analogy of 
healthy history we ought to have gone on 
worshipping the republic and calling each other 
citizen with increasing seriousness until some 
other part of the truth broke into our repub- 
lican temple. But in fact we have turned the 
freedom of democracy into a mere scepticism, 
destructive of everything, including democrac}' 
itself. It is none the less destructive because 
it is, so to speak, an optimistic scepticism — 
or, as I have said, a drear}' hope. It was none 
the better because the destroyers were always 
talking about the new vistas and enlighten- 
ments which their new negations opened to us. 
The republican temple, like any other strong 
building, rested on certain definite limits and 
supports. But the modern man inside it went 
on indefinitely knockmg holes in his own house 
and saying that they were windows. The 
result is not hard to calculate: the moral 
world Vv'as pretty well all windows and no 
house by the time that Bernard Shaw arrived 
on the scene. 

Then there entered into full swing that 
great game of which he soon became the 
greatest master. A progressive or advanced 
person was now to mean not a man who wanted 
democracy, but a man who wanted something 
6i 



George Bernard Shaw 



newer than democracy. A reformer was to be, 
not a man who wanted a parliament or a 
republic, but a man who wanted anything that 
he hadn't got. The emancipated man must 
cast a weird and suspicious eye round him at 
all the institutions of the world, wondering 
which of them was destined to die in the next 
few centuries. Each one of them was whisper- 
ing to himself, "What can I alter?" 

This quite vague and varied discontent 
probably did lead to the revelation of many 
incidental wrongs and to much humane hard 
work in certain holes and corners. It also 
gave birth to a great deal of quite futile and 
frantic speculation, which seemed destined to 
take away babies from women, or to give votes 
to tom-cats. But it had an evil in it much 
deeper and more psychologically poisonous 
than any superficial absurdities. There was in 
this thirst to be "progressive" a subtle sort of 
double-mindedness and falsity. A man was so 
eager to be in advance of his age that he pre- 
tended to be in advance of himself. Institu- 
tions that his wholesome nature and habit fullv 
accepted he had to sneer at as old-fashioned, 
out of a servile and snobbish fear of the future. 
Out of the primal forests, through all the real 
progress of history, man had picked his way 

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obeying his human instinct, or (in the excellent 
phrase) following his nose. But now he was 
trying, by violent athletic exertions, to get in 
front of his nose. 

Into this riot of all imaginary innovations 
Shaw brought the sharp edge of the Irishman 
and the concentration of the Puritan, and 
thoroughly thrashed all competitors in the 
difficult art of being at once modern and 
mtelligent. In twenty twopenny controversies 
he took the revolutionary side, I fear in most 
cases because it v^as called revolutionary. But 
the other revolutionists were abruptly startled 
by the presentation of quite rational and in- 
genious arguments on their own side. The 
dreary thing about most new causes is that 
they are praised in such very old terms. Every 
new religion bores us with the same stale 
rhetoric about closer fellowship and the higher 
life. No one ever aproximately equalled 
Bernard Shaw in the power of finding really 
fresh and personal arguments for these recent 
schemes and creeds. No one ever came within 
a mile of him in the knack of actually produc- 
ing a new argument for a new philosophy. I 
give two instances to cover the kind of thing I 
mean. Bernard Shaw (being honestly eager 
to put himself on the modern side in every- 

63 



George Bernard Shaw 



thing) put himself on the side of what is 
called the feminist movement; the proposal 
to give the two sexes not merely equal social 
privileges, but identical. To this it is often 
answered that women cannot be soldiers; and 
to this again the sensible feminists answer that 
women run their own kind of physical risk, 
while the silly feminists answer that war is an 
outworn barbaric thing which women would 
abolish. But Bernard Shaw took the line of 
saying that women had been soldiers, in all 
occasions of natural and unofficial war, as in 
the French Revolution. That has the great 
fighting value of being an unexpected argu- 
ment; it takes the other pugilist's breath 
away for one important instant. To take the 
other case, Mr. Shaw has found himself, led 
by the same mad imp of modernity, on the 
side of the people who want to have phonetic 
spelling. The people who want phonetic spell- 
ing generally depress the world with tireless 
and tasteless explanations of how much easier 
it would be for children or foreign bagmen 
if "height" were spelt "hite." Now children 
would curse spelling whatever it was, and we are 
not going to permit foreign bagmen to improve 
Shakespeare. Bernard Shaw charged along 
quite a different line; he urged that Shake- 

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The Progressive 



speare hiniself believed in phonetic spelling, 
since he spelt his own name in six different 
ways. According to Shaw, phonetic spelling 
is merely a return to the freedom and flexi- 
bility of Elizabethan literature. That, again, 
is exactly the kind of blow the old speller 
does not expect. As a matter of fact there 
is an answer to both the ingenuities I have 
quoted. When women have fought in revo- 
lutions tliey have generally shown that it was 
not natural to them, by their hysterical cruelty 
and insolence; it was the men who fought in 
the Revolution; it was the women who tortured 
the prisoners and mutilated the dead. And 
because Shakespeare could sing better than he 
could spell, it does not follow that his spelHng 
and ours ought to be abruptly altered by a 
race that has lost all instinct for singing. But 
I do not wish to discuss these points; I only 
(juote them as examples of the startling ability 
which really brought Shaw to the front; the 
ability to brighten even our modern move- 
ments with original and suggestive thoughts. 

But while Bernard Shaw pleasantly sur- 
prised innumerable cranks and revolutionists 
by finding quite rational arguments for them, 
he surprised them unpleasantly also by dis- 
covering something else. He discovered a 

E 65 



George Bernard Shaw 



turn of argument or trick of thought which 
has ever since been the plague of their Hves, 
and given him in all assemblies of their 
kind, in the Fabian Society or in the whole 
Socialist movement, a fantastic but most for- 
midable domination. This method may be 
approximately defined as that of revolu- 
tionising the revolutionists by turning their 
rationalism against their remaining senti- 
mentalism. But definition leaves the matter 
dark unless we give one or two examples. 
Thus Bernard Shaw threw himself as thor- 
oughly as any New Woman into the cause 
of the emancipation of w^omen. But while the 
New Woman praised woman as a prophetess, 
the new man took the opportunity to curse 
her and kick her as a comrade. For the 
others sex equality meant the emancipation of 
women, which allowed them to be equal to 
men. For Shaw it mainly meant the eman- 
cipation of men, which allowed them to be 
rude to w^omen. Indeed, almost every one 
of Bernard Shaw's earlier plays might be 
called an argument between a man and a 
woman, in which the woman is thumped and 
thrashed and outwitted until she admits that 
she is the equal of her concjueror. This is 
the first case of the Shavian trick of turning 

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The Progressive 



on the romantic rationalists with their own 
rationalism. He said in substance, "li we 
are democrats, let us have votes for women; 
but if we are democrats, why on earth should 
we have respect for women?" I take one 
other example out of many. Bernard Shaw 
was thrown early into what may be called 
the cosmopolitan club of revolution. The 
Socialists of the S.D.F. call it " L'lnter- 
nationale." but the club covers more than 
Socialists. It covers many who consider them- 
selves the champions of oppressed nationalities 
— Poland, Finland, and even Ireland; and 
thus a strong nationalist tendency exists in 
the revolutionary movement. Against this 
nationalist tendency Shaw set himself with 
sudden violence. If the flag of England was 
a piece of piratical humbug, was not the flag 
of Poland a piece of piratical humbug too r 
If we hated the jingoism of the existing armies 
and frontiers, why should we bring into 
existence new jingo armies and new jingo 
frontiers .^ All the other revolutionists fell 
in instinctively with Home Rule for Ireland. 
Shaw urged, in eff^ect, that Home Rule was as 
bad as Home Influences and Home Cooking, 
and all the other degrading domesticities that 
began with the word "Home." His ultimate 

67 



George Bernard Shaw 



support of the South African war was largely 
created by his irritation against the other 
revolutionists for favouring a nationahst re- 
sistance. The ordinary Imperialists objected 
to Pro-Boers because they were anti-patriots. 
Bernard Shaw objected to Pro-Boers because 
they were pro-patriots. 

But among these surprise attacks of G. B. S., 
these turnings of scepticism against the sceptics, 
there was one which has figured largely in his 
life; the most amusing and perhaps the most 
salutary of all these reactions. The "progres- 
sive" world being in revolt against religion 
had naturally felt itself allied to science; and 
against the authority of priests it would per- 
petually hurl the authority of scientific men. 
Shaw gazed for a few moments at this new 
authority, the veiled god of Huxley and Tyn- 
dall, and then with the greatest placidity 
and precision kicked it m the stomach. He 
declared to the astounded progressives around 
him that physical science was a mystical fake 
like sacerdotalism; that scientists, like priests, 
spoke with authority because they could not 
speak with proof or reason; that the very 
wonders of science were mostl}' lies, like the 
wonders of reliirion. "When astonomers tell 
me," he says somewhere, "that a star is so far 
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The Progressive 



off that its light takes a thousand years to reach 
us, the magnitude of the He seems to me ui- 
artistic." The paralysing impudence of such 
lemarks left everyone quite breathless; and 
even to this day this particular part of Shaw's 
satiric war has been tar less followed up than 
it deserves. For there was present in it an 
element very marked in Shaw's controversies; 
J mean that his apparant exaggerations are 
generall}' much better backed up by knowl- 
edge than would appear from their nature. 
He can lure his enemy on with fantasies and then 
overwhelm him with facts. Thus the man of 
science, when he read some w^ild passage in which 
Shaw compared Huxley to a tribal soothsayer 
grubbing in the entrails of animals, supposed the 
writer to be a mere fantastic whom science could 
crush with one finger. He would therefore en- 
gage in a controversy with Shaw about (let us 
say) vivisection, and discover to his horror that 
Shaw really knew a great deal about the subject, 
and could pelt him with expert witnesses and 
hospital reports. Among the many singular 
contradictions in a singular character, there is 
none more interesting; than this combination 
of exactitude and industry in the detail of 
opinions with audacity and a certain wildness 
in their outline. 



69 



George Bernard Shaw 



This sieat game of catching; revolutionists 
napping, of catching the unconventional people 
in conventional poses, of outmarching and 
outmanoeuvring progressives till they felt like 
conservatives, of undermining the mines ot 
Nihilists till they felt Hke the House of Lords, 
this great game of dishing the anarchists con- 
tinued for some time to be his most effective 
business. It would be untrue to say that he was 
a cynic; he was never a cynic, for that implies 
a certain corrupt fatigue about human affairs, 
whereas he was vibrating with virtue and 
energy. Nor would it be fair to call him 
even a sceptic, for that implies a dogma of 
hopelessness and definite belief in unbelief. 
But it would be strictly just to describe 
him at this time, at any rate, as a merely 
destructive person. He was one whose main 
business was, in his own view, the pricking 
of illusions, the stripping away of disguises, 
and even the destruction of ideals. He was 
a sort of anti-confectioner whose whole busi- 
ness it was to take the gilt off the ginger- 
bread. 

Now I have no particular objection to 
people who take the gilt off the ginger- 
bread; if only for this excellent reason, that 
I am much fonder of gingerbread than I am 

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The Progressive 



of gilt. But there are some objections to 
this task when it becomes a crusade or 
an obsession. One of them is this: that 
people who have really scraped the gilt oft 
gingerbread generally waste the rest ot their 
lives in attempting to scrape the gilt off 
gigantic lumps of gold. Such has too often 
been the case of Shaw. He can, if he likes, 
scrape the romance off the armaments of 
Europe or the party system of Great Britain. 
But he cannot scrape the romance off love 
or military valour, because it is all romance, 
and three thousand miles thick. It cannot, 
I think, be denied that much of Bernard 
Shaw's splendid mental energy has been wasted 
in this weary business of gnawing at the 
necessary pillars of all possible society. But 
it would be grossly unfair to indicate that 
even in his first and most destructive stage 
he uttered nothing except these accidental, if 
arresting, negations. He threw his whole 
genius heavily into the scale in favour of two 
positive projects or causes of the period. 
When we have stated these we have reall}/ 
stated the full intellectual equipment with 
NN'hich he started his literary life. 

I have said that Shaw was on the insurgent 
side in everything; but in the case of these 

71 



George Bernard Shatv 



two important convictions he exercised a solid 
power of choice. When he first went to 
London he mixed with every kind of revohi- 
tionary society, and met every kind of person 
except the ordinary person. He knew every- 
body, so to speak, except everybody. He 
was more than once a momentary apparition 
among the respectable atheists. He knew 
Bradlaugh and spoke on the platforms of that 
Hall of Science in which very simple and 
sincere masses of men used to hail w4th shouts 
of joy the assurance that they were not im- 
mortal. He retains to this day something of 
the noise and narrowness of that room; as, for 
instance, when he says that it is contemptible 
to have a craving for eternal life. This prej- 
udice remains in direct opposition to all his 
present opinions, which are all to the effect that 
it is glorious to desire power, consciousness, 
and vitality even for one's self. But this old 
secularist tag, that it is selfish to save one's 
soul, remains with him long- after he has 
practically glorified selfishness. It is a relic oi 
those chaotic early days. And just as he 
ming^led with the atheists he mingled with the 
anarchists, who were in the eighties a much 
more formidable body than now, disputing 
with the Socialists on almost equal terms the 

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claim to be the true heirs of the Revolution. 
Shaw still talks entertainingly about this group. 
As far as I can make out, it was almost entirely 
female. When a book came out called A Girl 
mnong the Anarchists, G. B. S. was provoked to 
a sort of explosive reminiscence. "A girl 
among the anarchists!" he exclaimed to his 
present biographer; "if they had said 'A man 
among the anarchists' it would have been 
more of an adventure." He is ready to tell 
other tales of this eccentric environment, most 
of which does not convey an impression of a 
very bracing atmosphere. That revolutionary 
society must have contained many high public 
ideals, but also a fair number of low private 
desires. And when people blame Bernard 
Shaw for his pitiless and prosaic coldness, his 
cutting refusal to reverence or admire, I think 
they should remember this riff-raff of lawless 
sentimentalism against which his common- 
sense had to strive, all the grandiloquent 
"comrades" and all the gushing "affinities," 
all the sweetstuff sensuality and senseless 
sulking against law. If Bernard Shaw became 
a little too fond of throwing cold water upon 
prophecies or ideals, remember that he must 
have passed much of his youth among cos- 
mopolitan idealists who wanted a little cold 
water in every sense of the word. 



George Bernard Shaiv 



Upon two of these modern crusades he 
concentrated, and, as I have said, he chose them 
well. The first was broadly what was called 
the Humanitarian cause. It did not mean the 
cause of humanity, but rather, if anything, the 
cause of evervthino; else. At its noblest it 
meant a sort of mystical identification of our 
life with the whole life of nature. So a man 
might wince when a snail was crushed as it 
his toe were trodden on; so a man might shrink 
when a moth shrivelled as if his own hair had 
caught fire. Man might be a network of 
exquisite nerves running over the whole 
universe, a subtle spider's web of pity. This 
was a fine conception; though perhaps a some- 
what severe enforcement of the theological 
conception of the special divinity of man. For 
the humanitarians certainly asked of humanity 
what can be asked of no other creature; no 
man ever required a dog to understand a cat 
or expected the cow to cry for the sorrows of 
the nightingale. 

Hence this sense has been strongest in 
saints of a very mystical sort; such as St. 
Francis who spoke of Sister Sparrow and 
Brother Wolf. Shaw adopted this crusade of 
cosmic pity but adopted it very much in his 
own style, severe, explanatory, and even un- 

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The Progressive 



sympathetic. He had no affectionate impulse 
to say "Brother Wolf"; at the best he would 
have said "Citizen Wolf," like a sound re- 
publican. In fact, he was full of healthy 
human compassion for the sufferings ot 
animals; but in phraseology he loved to put 
the matter unemotionally and even harshly. 
I was once at a debating club at which Bernard 
Shaw said that he was not a humanitarian at 
all, but only an economist, that he merely 
hated to see life wasted by carelessness or 
cruelty. I felt inclined to get up and address 
to him the following lucid question: "If 
when you spare a herring you are only being 
oikonomikal, for what oikos are you being 
nomikal.?" But in an average debating club 
I thought this question might not be quite 
clear; so I abandoned the idea. But certainly 
it is not plain for whom Bernard Shaw is 
economising: if he rescues a rhinoceros from 
an early grave. But the truth is that Shaw 
only took this economic pose from his hatred 
of appearing sentimental. If Bernard Shaw 
killed a dragon and rescued a princess of 
romance, he would try to say " I have saved a 
princess" with exactly the same intonation as 
"I have saved a shilling." He tries to turn 
his own heroism into a sort of superhuman 

75 



George Bernard Shaiv 



thrift. He would thoroughly sympathise 
with that passage in his favourite dramatic 
author in which the Button Moulder tells 
Peer Gynt that there is a sort of cosmic 
housekeeping; that God Himself is very 
economical, "and that is why He is so well 
to do." 

This combination of the widest kindness and 
consideration with a consistent ungraciousness 
of tone runs throucrh all Shaw's ethical utter- 
ance, and is nowhere more evident than in his 
attitude towards animals. He would waste 
himself to a white-haired shadow to save a 
shark in an aquarium from inconvenience or 
to add any little comforts to the life of a 
carrion-crow. He would defy any laws or 
lose any friends to show mercy to the humblest 
beast or the most hidden bird. Yet I cannot 
recall in the whole of his works or in the 
whole of his conversation a single word of any 
tenderness or intimacy with anv bird or beast. 
It was under the influence of this high and 
almost superhuman sense of duty that he 
became a vegetarian; and I seem to remember 
that when he was lying sick and near to death 
at the end of his Saturday Review career 
he wrote a fine fantastic article, declaring that 
his hearse ought to be drawn by all the 

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animals that he had not eaten. Whenever 
that evil day comes there will be no need to fall 
back on the ranks of the brute creation; there 
will be no lack of men and women who owe 
him so much as to be glad to take the place of 
the animals; and the present writer for one 
will be glad to express his gratitude as an 
elephant. There is no doubt about the 
essential manhood and decency of Bernard 
Shaw's instincts in such matters. And quite 
apart from the vegetarian controversy, I do 
not doubt that the beasts also owe him much. 
But when we come to positive things (and 
passions are the only truly positive things) 
that obstinate doubt remains which remains 
after all eulogies of Shaw. That fixed fancy 
sticks to the mind; that Bernard Shaw is a 
vegetarian more because he dislikes dead 
beasts than because he likes live ones. 

It was the same with the other great cause 
to which Shaw more politically though not 
more publicly committed himself. The actual 
English people, without representation in 
Press or Parliament, but faintly expressed in 
public-houses and music-halls, would connect 
Shaw (so far as they have heard of him) with 
two ideas; they would say first that he was 
a vegetarian, and second that he was a 

77 



George Ber7iard Shaw 



Socialist. Like most of the impressions of 
the ignorant, these impressions would be on 
the whole very just. My only purpose here 
is to urge that Shaw's Socialism exemplifies 
the same trait of temperament as his vege- 
tarianism. This book is not concerned with 
Bernard Shaw as a politician or a sociologist, 
but as a critic and creator of drama. I will 
therefore end in this chapter all that I have to 
say about Bernard Shaw as a politician or a 
political philosopher. I propose here to 
dismiss this aspect of Shaw: only let it be 
remembered, once and for all, that I am here 
dismissing the most important aspect of Shaw\ 
It is as if one dismissed the sculpture of 
Michael Angelo and went on to his sonnets. 
Perhaps the highest and purest thing in him is 
simply that he cares more for politics than for 
anything else; more than for art or for philos- 
ophy. Socialism is the noblest thing for 
Bernard Shaw; and it is the noblest thing in 
him. He really desires less to win fame than 
to bear fruit. He is an absolute follower of 
that early sage who wished only to make two 
blades of grass grow instead of one. He is 
a loyal subject of Henri Quatre, who said 
that he only wanted every Frenchman to have 
a chicken in his pot on Sunday; except, of 

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course, that he would call the repast cannibal- 
ism. But C(Etcris paribus he thinks more of 
that chicken than of the eagle of the universal 
empire; and he is always ready to support 
the grass against the laurel. 

Yet by the nature of this book the account 
of the most important Shaw, who is the 
Socialist, must be also the most brief. Social- 
ism (which I am not here concerned either to 
attack or defend) is, as everyone knows, the 
proposal that all property should be nationally 
owned that it may be more decently distributed. 
It is a proposal resting upon two principles, 
unimpeachable as far as they go: first, that 
frightful human calamities call tor immediate 
human aid; second, that such aid must almost 
always be collectively organised. If a ship is 
being wrecked, we organise a lifeboat; if a 
house is on fire, we organise a blanket; if half 
a nation is starving, we must organise work 
and food. That is the primary and powerful 
argument of the Socialist, and everything 
that he adds to it weakens it. The only 
possible line of protest is to suggest that it is 
rather shocking that we have to treat a normal 
nation as something exceptional, like a house 
on fire or a shipwreck. But of such things it 
may be necessary to speak later. The point 

79 



George Bernard Shaw 



here is that Shaw behaved towards SociaHsm 
just as he behaved towards vegetarianism; he 
offered every reason except the emotional 
reason, which was the real one. When taxed in a 
Daily News discussion with being a Socialist for 
the obvious reason that poverty was cruel, he 
said this was quite wrong; it was only because 
poverty was wasteful. He practically professed 
that modern society annoyed him, not so much 
like an unrighteous kingdom, but rather like 
an untidy room. Everyone who knew him 
knew, of course, that he was full of a proper 
brotherly bitterness about the oppression of 
the poor. But here again he would not admit 
that he was anything but an Economist. 

In thus setting his face like flint against 
sentimental methods of argument he un- 
doubtedly did one great service to the causes 
for which he stood. Every vulgar anti- 
humanitarian, every snob who wants monkeys 
vivisected or beggars flogged has always fallen 
back upon stereotyped phrases like "maudlin" 
and "sentimental," which indicated the humani- 
tarian as a man in a weak condition of tears. 
The mere personality of Shaw has shattered 
those foolish phrases for ever. Shaw^ the 
humanitarian was like Voltaire the humani- 
tarian, a man whose satire was like steel, the 

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hardest and coolest of fighters, upon whose 
piercing point the wretched defenders of a 
masculine brutality wriggled like worms. 

In this quarrel one cannot wish Shaw even 
an inch less contemptuous, for the people who 
call compassion "sentimentalism" deserve 
notiiing but contempt. In this one does not 
even regret his coldness; it is an honourable 
contrast to the blundering emotionalism of the 
]ingoes and flagellomaniacs. The truth is that 
the ordinary anti-humanitarian only manages 
to harden his heart by having already softened 
his head. It is the reverse of sentimental to 
insist that a nigger is being burned alive; for 
sentimentalism must be the clinging to pleasant 
thoughts. And no one, not even a Higher 
Evolutionist, can think a nigger burned 
alive a pleasant thought. The sentimental 
thing IS to warm your hands at the fire while 
denying the existence of the nigger, and that 
is the ruling habit in England, as it has been 
the chief business of Bernard Shaw to show. 
And in this the brutalitarians hate him not 
because he is soft, but because he is hard, 
because he is not to be softened by conventional 
excuses; because he looks hard at a thing — 
and hits harder. Some foolish fellow of the 
Henley-Whibley reaction wrote that if we 
F 8i 



George Bernard Shaw 



were to be conquerors we must be less tender 
and more ruthless. Shaw answered with realbv' 
avenging irony, "What a light this principle 
throws on the defeat of the tender Dervish, 
the compassionate Zulu, and the morbidly 
humane Boxer at the hands of the hardy 
savages of England, France, and Germany." 
In that sentence an idiot is obliterated and the 
whole story of Europe told; but it is im- 
mensely stiffened by its ironic form. In the 
same way Shaw washed away for ever the idea 
that Socialists were weak dreamers, who said 
that things might be only because they wished 
them to be. G. B. S. in argument with an 
individualist showed himself, as a rule, much 
the better economist and much the worse 
rhetorician. In this atmosphere arose a 
celebrated Fabian Society, of which he is still 
the leading spirit — a society which answered 
all charges of impracticable idealism by push- 
mg both its theoretic statements and its 
practical negotiations to the verge of cynicism. 
Bernard Shaw was the literary expert who 
wrote most of its pamphlets. In one of them, 
among such sections as Fabian Temperance 
Reform, Fabian Education and so on, there 
was an entry gravely headed " Fabian Nat- 
ural Science, " which stated that in the 

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Socialist cause light \vas needed more than heat. 
Thus the Irish detachment and the Puritan 
austerity did much good to the country and 
to the causes for which they were embattled. 
But there was one thing they did not do; they 
did nothing for Shaw himself in the matter 
of his primary mistakes and his real limitation. 
His great defect was and is the lack of demo- 
cratic sentiment. And there was nothing 
democratic either in his humanitarianism or 
his Socialism. These new and refined faiths 
tended rather to make the Irishman yet more 
aristocratic, the Puritan yet more exclusive. 
To be a Socialist was to look down on all the 
peasant owners of the earth, especially on the 
peasant owners of his own island. To be a 
Vegetarian was to be a man with a strange 
and mysterious morality, a man who thought 
the good lord who roasted oxen for his vassals 
only less bad than the bad lord who roasted 
the vassals. None of these advanced views could 
the common people hear gladly; nor indeed 
was Shaw specially anxious to please the com- 
mon people. It was his glory that he pitied 
animals like men; it was his defect that he 
pitied men only too much like animals. Foulon 
said oi the democracy, "Let them eat grass." 
Shaw said, "Let them eat greens." He had 

83 



George Bernard Shaw 



more benevolence, but almost as much disdain. 
"I have never had any feelings about the 
English working classes," he said elsewhere, 
"except a desire to abolish them and replace 
them by sensible people." This is the un- 
sympathetic side of the thing; but it had 
another and much nobler side, which must at 
least be seriously recognised before we pass on 
to much lighter things. 

Bernard Shaw is not a democrat; but he is 
a splendid republican. The nuance of differ- 
ence between those terms precisely depicts 
him. And there is after all a good deal oi dim 
democracy in England, in the sense that there 
is much of a blind sense of brotherhood, and 
nowhere more than among old-fashioned and 
even reactionary people. But a republican is 
a rare bird, and a noble one. Shaw is a 
republican in the literal and Latin sense; he 
cares more for the Public Thing than for any 
private thing. The interest of the State is 
v.ith him a sincere thirst of the soul, as it was 
in the little pagan cities. Now this public 
passion, this clean appetite for order and 
equity, had fallen to a lower ebb, had more 
nearly disappeared altogether, during Shaw's 
earlier epoch than at any other time. In- 
dividualism of the worst type was on the top 



The Progressive 

of the wave; I mean artistic individualism, 
which is so much crueller, so much bhnder 
and so much more irrational even than com- 
mercial individualism. The decay of society 
was praised by artists as the decay of a corpse 
is praised by worms. The aesthete was all 
receptiveness, like the flea. His only affair in 
this world was to feed on its facts and colours, 
like a parasite upon blood. The ego v/as the 
all; and the praise of it was enunciated in 
madder and madder rhythms by poets whose 
Helicon was absinthe and whose Pegasus was 
the nightmare. This diseased pride was not 
even conscious of a public interest, and would 
have found all political terms utterly tasteless 
and insignificant. It was no longer a question 
of one man one vote, but of one man one 
universe. 

I have in my time had my f^ing at the 
Fabian Society, at the pedantry of schemes, 
the arrogance of experts; nor do I regret it 
now. But when I remember that other world 
against which it reared its bourgeois banner of 
cleanliness and common sense, I will not end 
this chapter without doing it decent honour. 
Give me the drain pipes of the Fabians rather 
than the panpipes of the later poets; the drain 
pipes have a nicer smell. Give me even that 

85 



George Bernard Shaw 



businesslike benevolence that herded men like 
beasts rather than that exquisite art which iso- 
lated them like devils; give me even the sup- 
pression of "Zaeo" rather than the triumph oi 
"Salome." And if I feel such a confession to 
be due to those Fabians v^ho could hardly have 
been anything but experts in any society, such 
as Mr. Sidney Webb or Mr. Edward Pease, 
it is due yet more strongly to the greatest oi 
the Fabians. Here was a man who could 
have enjoyed art among the artists, who could 
have been the wittiest of all the flaneurs; who 
could have made epigrams like diamonds and 
drunk music like wine. He has mstead 
laboured in a mill of statistics and crammed 
his mind v^^ith all the most dreary and the 
most filthy details, so that he can argue on 
the spur of the moment about sewing-machines 
or sewage, about typhus fever or twopenny 
tubes. The usual mean theory of motives 
will not cover the case; it is not ambition, for 
he could have been twenty times more promi- 
nent as a plausible and popular humorist. It 
is the real and ancient emotion of the saliis 
popiili, almost extinct in our oligarchical chaos; 
nor will I for one, as I pass on to many 
matters of argument or quarrel, neglect to 
salute a passion so implacable and so pure. 

86 



The Critic 



IT appears a point of some mystery to the 
present writer that Bernard Shaw should 
have been so long unrecognised and al- 
most m beggar}'. I should have thought 
his talent was of the ringing and arresting 
sort; such as even editors and publishers 
would have sense enough to seize. Yet it is 
quite certain that he almost starved in London 
for many years, writing occasional columns 
for an advertisement or words for a picture. 
And it is equally certain (it is proved by 
twenty anecdotes, but no one who knows 
Shaw needs any anecdotes to prove it) that in 
those days of desperation he again and again 
threw up chances and flung back good bar- 
gains which did not suit his unique and 
erratic sense of honour. The fame of having 
rtrst ofi-'ered Shaw to the public upon a plat- 
form worthy of him belongs, like many other 
public services, to Mr. William Archer. 

I say it seems odd that such a writer should 
not be appreciated in a flash; but upon this 
point there is evidently a real difi^erence of 
opinion, and it constitutes for me the strangest 

87 



George Bernard Shaiv 



difficulty of the subject. I hear many people 
complain that Bernard Shaw deliberately mysti- 
fies them. I cannot imagine what they mean; 
it seems to me that he deliberately insults 
them. His language, especially on moral 
questions, is generally as straight and solid as 
that of a bargee and far less ornate and sym- 
bolic than that of a hansom-cabman. The 
prosperous English Philistine complains that 
Mr. Shaw is making- a fool of him. Whereas 
Mr. Shaw is not in the least making a fool of 
him; Mr. Shaw is, with laborious lucidity, 
calling him a fool. G. B. S. calls a landlord 
a thief; and the landlord^ inst pnd of dpnyincr 
or _ resenti ng it,, says. "Ah. that fellow hides 
his meaning so cleverly that one can nev er 
make out what he means, it is all so fine spun 
^ ^nd fantastical." , (t. B. S. calls a statesman a 
liar to his face, and the statesman cries in a 
kind of ecstasy, "Ah, what quaint, intricate 
and half-tangled trains of thought! Ah, 
what elusive and many-coloured mysteries of 
half-meaning!" I think it is always quite 
plain what Mr. Shaw means, even when he is 
joking, and it generally means that the people 
he is talking to ought to howl aloud for their 
sins. But the average representative of them 
imdoubtedly treats the Shavian meaning as 



The Critic 

tricky and complex, when it is really direct 
and offensive. He always accuses Shaw of 
pulling his leg, at the exact moment when 
Shaw is pulling his nose. 

This prompt and pungent style he learnt in 
the open, upon political tubs and platforms; and 
he is very legitimately proud of it. He boasts 
of being a demagogue; "The cart and the 
trumpet for me," he says, with admirable good 
sense. Everyone will remember the effective 
appearance of Cyrano de Bergerac in the first act 
of the fine play of that name; when instead 
of leaping in by any hackneyed door or window, 
he suddenly springs upon a chair above the 
crowd that has so far kept him invisible; "les 
bras croises, le feutre en bataille, la moustache 
herissee, le nez terrible." I will not go so 
far as to say that when Bernard Shaw sprang 
upon a chair or tub in Trafalgar Square he 
had the hat in battle, or even that he had the 
nose terrible. But just as we see Cyrano best 
when he thus leaps above the crowd, I think 
we may take this moment of Shaw stepping 
on his little platform to see him clearly as he 
then was, and even as he has largely not ceased 
to be. I, at least, have only known him in his 
middle age; yet I think I can see him, younger 
yet only a little more alert, with hair more red 

89 



George Bernard Shaw 



but with face yet paler, as he first stood up upon 
some cart or barrow in the tossing glare of the 
gas. 

The first fact that one realises about Shaw 
(independent of all one has read and often 
contradicting it) is his voice. Primaril)- it is 
the voice of an Irishman, and then something 
of the voice of a musician. It possibly ex- 
plains much of his career; a man may be 
permitted to say so many impudent things 
with so pleasant an intonation. But the voice 
is not only Irish and agreeable, it is also frank 
and as it were inviting conference. This goes 
with a style and gesture which can only be 
described as at once very casual and very 
emphatic. He assumes that bodily supremacy 
which goes with oratory, but he assumes it 
with almost ostentatious carelessness; he 
throws back the head, but loosely and laugh- 
ingly. He is at once swaggering and yet shrug- 
ging his shoulders, as if to drop from them the 
mantle of the orator which he has confidently 
assumed. Lastly, no man ever used voice or 
gesture better for the purpose of expressing 
certainty; no man can say "I tell Mr. Jones 
he is totally wrong" with more air of unforced 
and even casual conviction. 

This particular pla}' of feature or pitch of 
90 



The Critic 

voice, at once didactic and yet not uncomrade- 
like, must be counted a very important fact, 
especially in connection with the period when 
that voice was first heard. It must be remem- 
bered that Shaw emerged as a wit in a sort of 
secondary age of wits; one of those stale mter- 
ludes of prematurely old young men, which 
separate the serious epochs of history. Oscar 
Wilde was its god; but he was somewhat more 
mystical, not to say monstrous, than the average 
of its dried and decorous impudence. The 
two survivals of that time, as far as I know, 
are Mr. Max Beerbohm and Mr. Graham 
Robertson; two most charming people; but 
the air they had to live in was the devil. 
One of its notes was an artificial reticence of 
speech, which waited till it could plant the 
perfect epigram. Its typical products were far 
too conceited to lay down the law. Now when 
people heard that Bernard Shaw was witty, as 
he most certainly was, when they heard his 
mots repeated like those of Whistler or Wilde, 
when they heard things Hke "the Seven deadly 
Virtues" or "Who ^vas Hall Caine?" they 
expected another of these silent sarcastic 
dandies who went about with one epigram, 
patient and poisonous, like a bee with his one 
sting. And when they saw and heard the new 

91 



George Bernard Shaw 



humorist thev found no fixed sneer, no frock 
coat, no green carnation, no silent Savoy 
Restaurant good manners, no fear of looking a 
fool, no particular notion of looking a gentleman. 
They found a talkative Irishman with a kind 
voice and a brown coat; open gestures and an 
evident desire to make people really agree 
with him. He had his own kind of affectations 
no doubt, and his own kind of tricks of debate; 
but he broke, and, thank God, forever the 
spell of the little man with the single eye glass 
who had frozen both faith and fun at so many 
tea-tables. Shaw's humane voice and hearty 
manner were so obviously more the things of a 
great man than the hard, gem-like brilliancy 
of Wilde or the careful ill-temper of Whistler. 
He brouirht in a breezier sort of insolence; 
the single eye-glass fled before the single eye. 
Added to the effect of the amiable dogmatic 
voice and lean, loose swaggering figure, is 
that of the face with which so many carica- 
turists have fantastically delighted themselves, 
the Mephistophilean face with the fierce tufted 
eyebrows and forked red beard. Yet those 
caricaturists in their natural delight in com- 
ing upon so striking a face, have somewhat 
misrepresented it, making it merely Satanic; 
whereas its actual expression has quite as 

92 



The Critic 

iiuich benevolence as mockery. By this time 
his costume has become a part of his person- 
ality; one has come to think of the reddish 
brown Jaeger suit as if it were a sort of reddish 
brown fur, and were, Hke the hair and eyebrows, 
a part of the animal; yet there are those who 
claim to remember a Bernard Shaw of vet 

J 

more awful aspect before Jaeger came to his 
assistance; a Bernard Shaw in a dilapidated 
frock-coat and some sort of straw hat. I can 
hardly believe it; the man is so much of a 
piece, and must alwaj-'s have dressed appropri- 
ately. In any case his brown woollen clothes, 
at once artistic and hygienic, completed the 
appeal for which he stood; which might be 
defined as an eccentric healthy-mindedness. 
But something of the vagueness and equivoca- 
tion of his first fame is probably due to the 
different functions which he performed in the 
contemporary world of art. 

He began by writing novels. They are 
not much read, and indeed not imperatively 
worth reading, with the one exception of the 
crude and magnificent Cashel Byron s Pro- 
fession. Mr. William Archer, in the course 
of his kindly efforts on behalf of his young 
Irish friend, sent this book to Samoa, for the 
opinion of the most elvish and yet efficient 

93 



George Bernard Shaw 



of modern critics. Stevenson summed up 
much of Shaw even from that fragment when 
he spoke of a romantic griffin roaring with 
laughter at the nature of his own quest. He 
also added the not wholly unjustified post- 
script: "I say, Archer, — my God, what 
women!" 

The fiction was largely dropped; but when 
he began work he felt his way by the avenues 
of three arts. He was an art critic, a dramatic 
critic, and a musical critic; and in all three, 
it need hardly be said, he fought for the 
newest style and the most revolutionary 
school. He wrote on all these as he would 
have written on anything; but it was, I fancy, 
about the music that he cared most. 

It may often be remarked that mathe- 
maticians love and understand music more 
than they love or understand poetry. Bernard 
Shaw is in much the same condition; indeed, 
in attempting to do justice to Shakespeare's 
poetry, he always calls it "word music." It 
is not difficult to explain this special attach- 
ment of the mere logician to music. The 
logician, like every other man on earth, must 
have sentiment and romance in his existence; 
in every man's life, indeed, which can be called 
a life at all, sentiment is the most solid thing. 

94 



The Critic 

But if the extreme logician turns for his emo- 
tions to poetry, he is exasperated and bewildered 
bv discovering that the words of his own trade 
are used in an entirely different meaning. 
He conceives that he understands the word 
'S'isible," and then finds Milton applying it 
to darkness, in which nothing is visible. He 
supposes that he understands the word "hide," 
and then finds Shelley talking of a poet hidden 
in the light. He has reason to believe that 
he understands the common word "hung"; 
and then William Shakespeare, Esquire, of 
Stratford-on-Avon, gravely assures him that 
the tops of the tall sea waves were hung 
with deafening clamours on the slippery clouds. 
That is why the common arithmetician prefers 
music to poetry. Words are his scientific in- 
struments. It irritates him that they should 
be anyone else's musical instruments. He is 
willing to see men juggling, but not men 
juggling with his own private tools and pos- 
sessions — his terms. It is then that he turns 
with an utter relief to music. Here is all the 
same fascination and inspiration, all the same 
purity and plunging force as in poetry; but 
not requiring any verbal confession that light 
conceals things or that darkness can be seen 
in the dark. Music is mere beauty; it is 

95 



George Bernard Shaw 



beauty in the abstract, beauty in solution. It 
is a shapeless and liquid element of beauty, in 
which a man may really float, not indeed affirm- 
ing the truth, but not denying it. Bernard 
Shaw, as I have already said, is infinitely far 
above all such mere mathematicians and pe- 
dantic reasoners; still his feeling is partly the 
same. He adores music because it cannot 
deal with romantic terms either in their right 
or their wrong sense. Music can be romantic 
without reminding him of Shakespeare and 
Walter Scott, with whom he has had personal 
quarrels. Music can be Catholic without 
reminding him verbally of the Catholic 
Church, which he has never seen, and is 
sure he does not like. Bernard Shaw can 
agree with Wagner, the musician, because 
he speaks without words; if it had been 
Wagner the man he would certainly have 
had words with him. Therefore I would 
suggest that Shaw's love of music (which 
IS so fundamental that it must be men- 
tioned early, if not first, in his story) may 
itself be considered in the first case as the 
imaginative safety-valve of the rationalistic 
Irishman. 

This much may be said conjecturally over 
the present signature; but more must not be 



Tlie Critic 

Miid. Bernard Shaw understands music so 
much better than I do that it is just possible 
that he is, in that tongue and atmosphere, all 
that he is not elsewhere. While he is writing 
with a pen I know his limitations as much as 
I admire his genius; and I know it is true to 
say that he does not appreciate romance. But 
while he is playing on the piano he may be 
cocking a feather, drawing a sword or draining 
a flagon For all I know. While he is speaking 1 
am sure that there are some things he does not 
understand. But while he is listening (at the 
Queen's Hall) he may understand everything, 
including God and me. Upon this part of 
him I am a reverent agnostic; it is well to 
have some such dark continent in the character 
of a man of whom one writes. It preserves 
two very important things — modesty in the biog- 
rapher and mystery in the biography. 

For the purpose of our present generalisa- 
tion it is only necessary to say that Shaw, as a 
musical critic, summed himself up as "The 
Perfect Wagnerite"; he threw himself into 
subtle and yet trenchant eulogy of that revolu- 
tionary voice in music. It was the same with 
the other arts. As he was a Perfect Wagnerite 
in music, so he was a Perfect Whistlerite in 
painting; so above all he was a Perfect Ibsenite 
G 97 



George Berfiard Shaw 



in drama. And with this we enter that part 
of his career with which this book is more 
specially concerned. When Mr. Wilham 
Archer got him estahhshed as dramatic critic 
of the Saturday Revietv, he became for the first 
time "a star of the stage"; a shooting star 
and sometimes a destroying comet. 

On the day of that appointnient opened 
one of the very few exhilarating and honest 
battles that broke tlie silence of the slow and 
cynical collapse of the nineteenth century. 
Bernard Shaw the demagogue had got his 
cart and his truinpet; and was resolved to 
make them like the car of destiny and the 
trumpet of judgment. He had not the ser- 
vility of the ordinary rebel, who is content to 
go on rebelling against kings and priests, 
because such rebellion is as old and as estab- 
lished as any priests or kings. He cast about 
him for something to attack which was not 
merely powerful or placid, but was unattacked. 
After a little quite sincere reflection, he found 
it. He would not be content to be a common 
atheist; he wished to blaspheme something 
in which even atheists believed. He was not 
satisfied with being revolutionary; there were 
so many revolutionists. He wanted to pick 
out some prominent institution which had been 

98 



The Critic 

1 nationally and instinctively accepted by the 
most violent and profane; something of which 
Mr. Foote would speak as respectfully on the 
front page of the Freethinker as Mr. St. Loe 
Strachey on the front page of the Spectator. 
He found the thing; he found the great 
unassailed English institution — Shakespeare. 

But Shaw's attack on Shakespeare, though 
exaggerated for the fun of the thing, was not 
by any means the mere folly or firework 
paradox that has been supposed. He meant 
what he said; what was called his levity was 
merely the laughter of a man who enjoyed 
saying what he meant — an occupation which 
is indeed one of the greatest larks in life. 
Moreover, it can honestly be said that Shaw 
did good by shaking the mere idolatry of Him 
of Avon. That idolatry was bad for England; 
it buttressed our perilous self-complacency by 
making us think that we alone had, not 
merely a great poet, but the one poet above 
criticism. It was bad for literature; it made 
a minute model out of work that was really 
a hasty and faulty masterpiece. And it was 
bad for religion and morals that there should 
be so huge a terrestrial idol, that w^e should 
put such utter and unreasoning trust in any 
child of man. It is true that it was largely 

99 



George Bernard Shaw 



through Shaw's own defects that he beheld the 
defects of Shakespeare. But it needed some- 
one equally prosaic to resist what was perilous 
in the charm of such poetry; it may not be 
altogether a mistake to send a deaf man to 
destroy the rock of the sirens. 

This attitude of Shaw illustrates of course 
all three of the divisions or aspects to which 
the reader's attention has been drawn. It was 
partly the attitude of the Irishman objecting 
to the Englishman turning his mere artistic 
taste into a religion; especially wdien it was 
a taste merely taught him by his aunts and 
uncles. In Shaw's opinion (one might say) 
the English do not really enjoy Shakespeare 
or even admire Shakespeare; one can only 
say, in the strong colloquialism, that the}^ swear 
by Shakespeare. He is a mere god; a thing 
to be invoked. And Shaw's whole business 
was to set up the things which were to be 
sworn by as things to be sworn at. It was 
partly again the revolutionist in pursuit of 
pure novelty, hating primarily the oppression 
of the past, almost hating history itself. For 
Bernard Shaw the prophets were to be stoned 
after, and not before, men had built their 
sepulchres. There was a Yankee smartness 
in the man which was irritated at the idea of 



The Critic 

being dominated by a person dead for three 
liundred years; like Mark Twain, he wanted 
a fresher corpse. 

These two motives there were, but they 
were small compared with the other. It was 
the third part of him, the Puritan, that was 
really at war with Shakespeare. He denounced 
that playwright almost exactly as any contem- 
porary Puritan coming out of a conventicle 
in a steeple-crowned hat and stiff bands might 
have denounced the playwright coming out of 
the stage door of the old Globe Theatre. This 
is not a mere fancy; it is philosophically true. 
A legend has run round the newspapers that 
Bernard Shaw offered himself as a better 
writer than Shakespeare. This is false and 
quite unjust; Bernard Shaw never said any- 
thing of the kind. The writer whom he did 
say was better than Shakespeare was not him- 
self, but Bunyan. And he justified it by attrib- 
uting to Bunyan a virile acceptance of life as 
a high and harsh adventure, while in Shake- 
speare he saw nothing but profligate pessimism, 
the vanitas vanifaium of a disappointed volup- 
tuary. According to this view Shakespeare 
was always saying, "Out, out, brief candle," 
because his was only a ballroom candle; while 
Bunvan was seekino- to lio;ht such a candle 



George Bernard Shaw 



as by God's grace should never be put out. 
It is odd that Bernard Shaw's chief error 
or insensibility should have been the instru- 
ment of his noblest affirmation. The 
denunciation of Shakespeare was a mere 
misunderstanding. But the denunciation of 
Shakespeare's pessimism was the most splen- 
didly understanding of all his utterances. 
This is the greatest thing in Shaw, a serious 
optimism — even a tragic optimism. Life is 
a thing too glorious to be enjoyed. To be 
is an exacting and exhaustmg business; the 
trumpet though inspiring is terrible. Nothing 
that he ever wrote is so noble as his simple 
reference to the sturdy man w^io stepped up to 
the Keeper of the Book of Life and said, 
"Put down my name. Sir." It is true that 
Shaw called this heroic philosophy by wrong 
names and buttressed it with false meta- 
physics; that was the weakness of the age. 
The temporary declme of theology had in- 
volved the neglect of philosophy and all fine 
thinking; and Bernard Shaw had to find 
shaky justifications in Schopenhauer for the 
sons of God shouting for joy. He called it 
the Will to Live — a phrase invented bv 
Prussian professors who would like to exist, 
but can't. Afterwards he asked people to 

102 



The Critic 

worship the Life- Force; as if one could 
worship a hyphen. But though he covered 
it with crude new names (which are now 
fortunately crumbling everywhere like bad 
mortar) he was on the side of the good old 
cause; the oldest and the best of all causes, 
the cause of creation against destruction, the 
cause of yes against no, the cause of the seed 
against the stony earth and the star against 
the abyss. 

His misunderstanding of Shakespeare arose 
largely from the fact that he is a Puritan, 
while Shakespeare was spiritually a Catholic. 
The former is always screwing himself up to 
see truth; the latter is often content that 
truth is there. The Puritan is only strong 
enough to stiffen; the Catholic is strong 
enough to relax. Shaw, I think, has entirely 
misunderstood the pessimistic passages of 
Shakespeare. They are flying moods which 
a man with a fixed faith can afford to entertain. 
That all is vanity, that life is dust and love 
is ashes, these are frivolities, these are jokes 
that a Catholic can afford to utter. He knovv's 
well enough that there is a life that is not 
dust and a love that is not ashes. But just 
as he may let himself go more than the 
Puritan in the matter of enjoyment, so he 
103 



George Bernard Shaw 



may let himself go more than the Puritan in 
the matter of melancholy. The sad exuber- 
ances of Hamlet are merely like the glad 
exuberances of Falstaff. This is not con- 
jecture; it is the text of Shakespeare. In 
the very act of uttering his pessimism, Hamlet 
admits that it is a mood and not the truth. 
Heaven is a heavenly thing, only to him it 
seems a foul congregation of vapours. Man 
is the paragon of animals, only to him he 
seems a quintessence of dust. Hamlet is 
quite the reverse of a sceptic. He is a man 
whose strong intellect believes much more 
than his weak temperament can make vivid 
to him. But this power of knowing a thing 
without feeling it, this power of believing a 
thing without experiencing it, this is an old 
Catholic complexity, and the Puritan has never 
understood it. Shakespeare confesses his 
moods (mostly by the mouths of villains and 
failures), but he never sets up his moods 
against his mind. His cry of vanitas vani- 
tatinn is itself only a harmless vanity. Readers 
may not agree with my calling him Catholic 
with a big C; but they will hardly complain 
of my calling him catholic with a small one. 
And that is here the principal point. Shake- 
speare was not in any sense a pessimist; he 

104 



The Critic 

^vas, if anything, an optimist so universal as 
to be able to enjoy even pessimism. And this 
is exactly where he difl'ers from the Puritan. 
I he true Puritan is not squeamish: the true 
Puritan is free to say "Damn it!'' But the 
Catholic Elizabethan was free (on passing prov- 
ocation) to say "Damn it all!" 

It need hardly be explained that Bernard 
Shaw added to his negative case ot a dramatist 
to be depreciated a corresponding affirmative 
case of a dramatist to be exalted and advanced. 
He was not content with so remote a com- 
parison as that between Shakespeare and Bun- 
van. In his vivacious weekly articles in the 
Saturday Review, the real comparison upon 
which everything turned was the comparison 
between Shakespeare and Ibsen. He early 
threw himself with all possible eagerness into 
the public disputes about the great Scandi- 
navian; and though there was no doubt 
whatever about which side he supported, there 
was much that was individual in the line he 
took. It is not our business here to explore 
that extinct volcano. You may say that anti- 
Ibsenism is dead, or you may say that Ibsen is 
dead; in any case, that controversy is dead, 
and death, as the Roman poet says, can alone 
confess of what small atoms we are made. 
105 



George Bernard Sha^v 



The opponents of Ibsen largely exhibited the 
permanent qualities of the populace; that is, 
their instincts were right and their reasons 
wrong. They made the complete controver- 
sial mistake of calling Ibsen a pessimist; 
whereas, indeed, his chief w^eakness is a rather 
childish confidence in mere nature and free- 
dom, and a blindness (either of experience or 
of culture) in the matter of original sin. In 
this sense Ibsen is not so much a pessimist as 
a highly crude kind of optimist. Nevertheless 
the man in the street was right in his tunda- 
mental instinct, as he always is. Ibsen, in his 
pale northern style, is an optimist; but for all 
that he is a depressing person. The optimism 
of Ibsen is less comforting than the pessi- 
mism of Dante; ]ust as a Norwegian sunrise, 
however splendid, is colder than a Southern 
night. 

But on the side of those who fought for 
Ibsen there was also a disagreement, and per- 
haps also a mistake. The vague army of "the 
advanced" (an army which advances in all 
directions) were united in feeling that they 
ought to be the friends of Ibsen because he 
also was advancing somewhere somehow. But 
they were also seriously impressed by Flau- 
bert, by Oscar Wilde and all the rest who 

1 06 



The Critic 

told them that a work of art was in another 
universe from ethics and social good. There- 
fore many, I think most, of the Ibsenites 
praised the Ibsen plays merely as choses vues, 
aesthetic affirmations of what can be without 
any reference to what ought to be. Mr. 
William Archer himself inclined to this view, 
though his strong sagacity kept him in a haze 
of healthy doubt on the subject. Mr. Walk- 
ley certainly took this view. But this view 
Mr. George Bernard Shaw abruptly and vio- 
lently refused to take. 

With the full Puritan combination of 
passion and precision he informed everybody 
that Ibsen was not artistic, but moral; that 
his dramas were didactic, that all great art 
was didactic, that Ibsen was strongly on the 
side of some of his characters and strongly 
against others, that there was preaching and 
public spirit in the work of good dramatists; 
and that if this were not so, dramatists and 
all other artists would be mere panders of 
mtellectual debauchery, to be locked up as 
the Puritans locked up the stage players. No 
one can understand Bernard Shaw who does 
not give full value to this early revolt of his 
on behalf of ethics against the rulino- school 
of Fart pour Fart. It is interesting because 
107 



George Bernard Shaw 



it is connected with other ambitions in the 
man, especially with that which has made him 
somewhat vainer of being a Parish Councillor 
than of being one of the most popular 
dramatists in Europe. But its chief interest 
is again to be referred to our stratification 
of the pyscholog}'-; it is the lover of true 
things rebelling for once against merely new 
things; it is the Puritan suddenly refusing 
to be the mere Progressive. 

But this attitude obviously laid on the 
ethical lover of Ibsen a not inconsiderable 
obligation. If the new drama had an ethical 
purpose, what was it ^ and if Ibsen was a 
moral teacher, what the deuce was he teach- 
ing ? Answers to this question, answers of 
manifold brilliancy and promise, w^ere scattered 
through all the dramatic criticisms of those 
years on the Saturday Review. But even 
Bernard Shaw grew tired after a time of dis- 
cussing Ibsen onh' in connection with the 
current pantomime or the latest musical 
comedy. It was felt that so much smcerity 
and fertility of explanation justified a con- 
centrated attack; and in 1891 appeared the 
brilliant book called The Quintessence of 
Ibsenism, which some have declared to be 
merely the quintessence of Shaw. However 

108 



The Critic 

thiis may be, it was in fact and profession 
the quintessence of Shaw's theory of the 
morality or propaganda of Ibsen. 

The book itself is much longer than the 
book that I am writing; and as is only right 
in so spirited an apologist, every paragraph is 
provocative. I could write an essay on every 
sentence which I accept and three essays on 
every sentence which I deny. Bernard Shaw 
himself is a master of compression; he can 
put a conception more compactly than any 
other man alive. It is therefore rather 
difficult to compress his compression; one 
feels as if one were trymg to extract a beet 
essence from Bovril. But the shortest form 
in which I can state the idea of The Quin- 
tessence of lbs en ism is that it is the idea of 
distrusting ideals, which are universal, in com- 
parison with facts, which are miscellaneous. 
The man whom he attacks throughout he 
calls "Ihe Idealist"; that is the man who 
permits himself to be mainly moved by a 
moral generalisation. "Actions," he sa}'s, 
"are to be judged by their effect on happi- 
ness, and not by their conformity to any 
ideal." As we have already seen, there is a 
certain inconsistency here; for while Shaw 
had always chucked all ideals overboard the 
log 



George Bernard Shaw 



one he had chucked first was the idea! of 
happiness. Passing this however for the 
present, we may mark the above as the most 
satisfying summary. If I tell a He I am not 
to blame myself for having violated the ideal 
of truth, but only for having perhaps got 
myself into a mess and made things worse 
than they were before. If I have broken my 
word I need not feel (as my fathers did) that 
I have broken something inside of me, as one 
who breaks a blood vessel. It all depends on 
whether I have broken up something outside 
me; as one who breaks up an evening party. 
If I shoot my father the only question is 
whether I have made him happy. I must 
not admit the idealistic conception that the 
mere shooting of my father might possibly 
make me unhappy. We are to judge of 
every individual case as it arises, apparently 
without any social summary or moral ready- 
reckoner at all. "The Golden Rule is that 
there is no Golden Rule." We must not 
say that it is right to keep promises, but 
that it may be right to keep this promise. 
Essentially it is anarchy; nor is it very easy 
to see how a state could be very comfort- 
able which was Socialist in all its public 
morality and Anarchist in all its private, 
no 



The Critic 

But if it is anarchy, it is anarchy without 
any of the abandon and exuberance of anarchv. 
It is a worried and conscientious anarchy; an 
anarchy of painful deHcacy and even caution. 
For it refuses to trust in traditional experi- 
ments or plainly trodden tracks; every case 
must be considered anew from the beginning, 
and vet considered with the most wide-eyed 
care for human welfare; every man must act 
as if he were the first man made. Brief!}', 
we must always be worrying about what is 
best for our children, and we must not take 
one hint or rule of thumb from our fathers. 
Some think that this anarchism would make 
a man tread down mighty cities in his mad- 
ness. I think it would make a man walk 
down the street as if he were walking on egg- 
shells. I do not think this experiment in 
opportunism would end in frantic license; 1 
think it would end in frozen timidity. If a 
man was forbidden to solve moral problems 
by moral science or the help of mankind, his 
course would be quite easy — he w^ould not 
solve the problems. The world instead of 
being a knot so tangled as to need unravel- 
ling, would simply become a piece of clock- 
work too complicated to be touched. I cannot 
think that this untutored worry was what 

II I 



George Bernard Shaw 



Ibsen meant; I have my doubts as to wliether 
it was what Shaw meant; but I do not think 
that it can be substantially doubted that it was 
what he said. 

In any case it can be asserted that the 
general aim of the work was to exalt the 
immediate conclusions of practice against 
the general conclusions of theory. Shaw 
objected to the solution of every problem in 
a play being by its nature a general solution, 
applicable to all other such problems. He 
disliked the entrance of a universal justice at 
the end of the last act; treading down all the 
personal ultimatums and all the varied cer- 
tainties of men. He disliked the god from 
the machine — because he was from a machine. 
But even without the machine he tended to 
dislike the god; because a god is more general 
than a man. His enemies have accused Shaw 
of being anti-domestic, a shaker of the roof- 
tree. But in this sense Shaw may be called 
almost madly domestic. He wishes each pri- 
vate problem to be settled in private, without 
reference to sociological ethics. And the only 
objection to this kind of gigantic casuistry is 
that the theatre is really too small to discuss 
it. It would not be fair to play David and 
Goliath on a stage too small to admit Goliath. 

112 



The Critic 



And it is not fair to discuss private morality 
on a stage too small to admit the enormous 
presence of public morality; that character 
which has not appeared in a play since the 
Middle Ages; whose name is Everyman and 
whose honour we have all in our keeping. 



H 113 



The Dramatist 



TO one who was alive at the time 
and interested in such matters 
will ever forget the hrst acting 
. of Arms and the Man. It was 
applauded by that indescribable element in 
all of us which rejoices to see the genuine 
thing prevail against the plausible; that ele- 
ment which rejoices that even its enemies are 
alive. Apart from the problems raised in the 
play, the very form of it was an attractive 
and forcible innovation. Classic plays which 
were wholly heroic, comic plays which were 
wholly and even heartlessly ironical, were 
common enough. Commonest of all in this 
particular time was the play that began play- 
fully, with plenty of comic business, and was 
gradually sobered by sentiment until it ended 
on a note of romance or even of pathos. A 
commonplace little officer, the butt of the 
mess, becomes by the last act as high and 
hopeless a lover as Dante. Or a vulgar and 
violent pork-butcher remembers his own youth 
before the curtain goes down. The first thinir 
that Bernard Shaw did when he stepped before 

114 



The Dramatist 



the footlights was to reverse this process. He 
resolved to build a play not on pathos, but on 
bathos. The officer should be heroic first 
and then everyone should laugh at him; the 
curtain should go up on a man remembering 
his youth, and he should only reveal himself 
as a violent pork-butcher when someone in- 
terrupted him with an order for pork. This 
merely technical originality is indicated m the 
very title of the play. The Arma Virutnqiie 
of \'irgil is a mounting and ascending phrase, 
the man is more than his weapons. The Latin 
line suggests a superb procession which should 
bring on to the stage the brazen and resound- 
ing armour, the shield and shattering axe, but 
end with the hero himself, taller and more 
terrible because unarmed. The technical effect 
of Shaw's scheme is like the same scene, 
m which a crowd should carry even more 
gigantic shapes of shield and helmet, but when 
the horns and howls were at their highest, 
should end with the figure of Little Tich. 
The name itself is meant to be a bathos; 
arms — and the man. 

It is well to begin with the superficial; and 
this is the superficial effectiveness of Shaw; 
the brilliancy of bathos. But of course the 
vitality and value of his plays does not lie 

.115 



George Bernard Shaw 



merely in this; any more than the vakie of 
Swinburne Hes in alHteration or the value of 
Hood in puns. This is not his message; but 
it is his method; it is his style. The first 
taste we had of it was in this play of Arms and 
the Man; but even at the very first it was 

J 

evident that there was much more in the play 
than that. Among other things there was one 
thing not unimportant; there was savage 
sincerity. Indeed, only a ferociously sincere 
person can produce such effective flippancies 
on a matter like war; just as only a strong 
man could juggle with cannon balls. It is all 
very well to use the word "fool" as synony- 
mous with "jester"; but daily experience 
shows that it is generally the solemn and 
silent man v/ho is the fool. It is all very well 
to accuse Mr. Shaw of standing on his head; 
but if you stand on your head you must have 
a hard and solid head to stand on. In Arms 
(ind the Man the bathos of form was strictly 
the incarnation of a strong satire in the idea. 
The play opens in an atmosphere of military 
melodrama; the dashmg officer of cavalry 
iroing off to death in an attitude, the lovely 
heroine left in tearful rapture; the brass band, 
the noise of guns and the red fire. Into all this 
enters Bluntschli, the little sturdy crop-haired 

ii6 



The Dramatist 



Swiss professional soldier, a man without a 
country but with a trade. He tells the armv- 
adoring heroine frankly that she is a humbug; 
and she, after a moment's reflection, appears 
to agree with him. The play is like nearh' 
all Shaw's plays, the dialogue of a conversion. 
Bv the end of it the young lady has lost all 
her military illusions and admires this mer- 
cenary soldier not because he faces guns, but 
because he faces facts. 

This was a fitting entrance for Shaw to his 
didactic drama; because the commonplace 
courage which he respects in Bluntschli was the 
one virtue which he was destined to praise 
throughout. We can best see how the play 
symbolises and summarises Bernard Shaw if we 
compare it with some other attack by modern 
humanitarians upon war. Shaw has many of 
the actual opinions of Tolstoy. Like Tolstoy 
he tells men, with coarse innocence, that 
romantic war is only butchery and that roman- 
tic love is only lust. But Tolstoy objects to 
these thmgs because they are real; he really 
wishes to abolish them. Shaw only objects to 
them in so far as they are ideal; that is in so 
far as they are idealised. Shaw objects not so 
much to war as to the attractiveness of war. 
He does nor so much dislike love as the love 

117 



George Bernard Shaw 



of love. Before the temple of Mars, Tolstoy 
stands and thunders, "There shall be no wars"; 
Bernard Shaw merely murmurs, "Wars if you 
must; but for God's sake, not war songs." 
Before the temple of Venus, Tolstoy cries 
terribly, "Come out of it!"; Shaw is quite 
content to say, "Do not be taken in by it." 
Tolstoy seems really to propose that high 
passion and patriotic valour should be destroyed. 
Shaw is more moderate; and only asks that 
they should be desecrated. Upon this note, 
both about sex and conflict, he was destined to 
dwell through much of his work with the most 
wonderful variations of witty adventure and 
mtellectual surprise. It may be doubted per- 
haps whether this realism in love and war is 
(juite so sensible as it looks. Securiis judicat 
orhis terraruni; the world is wiser than the 
moderns. The world has kept sentimentalities 
simply because they are the most practical 
things in the world. They alone make men 
do things. The world does not encourag-e a 
(|uite rational lover, simply because a perfectly 
rational lover would never get married. The 
world does not encourage a perfectly rational 
army, because a perfectly rational army would 
run awa}'. 

The brain of Bernard Shaw was like a wedge 

ii8 



i 



The Dramatist 



in the literal sense. Its sharpest end was 
always in front; and it split our society from 
end to end the moment it had entrance at all. 
As I have said he was long unheard of; but 
he had not the tragedy of many authors, who 
were heard of long before they were heard. 
When you had read any Shaw you read all 
Shaw. When you had seen one of his plays you 
waited for more. And when he brought them 
out in volume form, you did what is repugnant 
to any literary man — you bought a book. 

The dramatic volume with which Shaw 
dazzled the public was called. Plays, Pleasant 
and Unpleasant. I think the most striking 
and typical thing about it was that he did not 
know^ very clearly which plays w^ere unpleasant 
and which were pleasant. "Pleasant" is a word 
which is almost unmeaning to Bernard Shaw. 
Except, as I suppose, in music (where I cannot 
follow him), relish and receptivity are things 
that simply do not appear. He has the best 
of tongues and the worst of palates. With the 
possible exception of A4rs. fVarrens Profession 
(which was at least unpleasant m the sense 
of being forbidden) I can see no particular 
reason why any of the seven plays should be 
held specially to please or displease. First \n 
fame and contemporary importance came the 

119 



George Bernard Shaio 



reprint of Arms and the Man, of which I have 
already spoken. Over all the rest towered un- 
questionably the two figures of Mrs. Warren 
and of Candida. They were neither of them 
pleasant, except as all good art is pleasant. 
They were neither of them really unpleasant 
except as all truth is unpleasant. But they did 
represent the author's normal preference and 
his principal fear; and those two sculptured 
giantesses largely upheld his fame. 

I fancy that the author rather dislikes 
Candida because it is so generally liked. I give 
my own feeling for what it is worth (a foolish 
phrase), but I think that there were only two 
moments when this powerful writer was truly, 
in the ancient and popular sense, inspired; 
that is, breathing from a bigger self and telling 
more truth than he knew. One is that scene 
in a later play where after the secrets and 
revenges of Egypt have rioted and rotted all 
round him, the colossal sanity of Caesar is 
suddenly acclaimed with swords. The other 
is that great last scene in Candida where the 
wife, stung into final speech, declared her pur- 
pose of remaining with the strong man because 
he is the weak man. The wife is asked to 
decide between two men, one a strenuous self- 
confident popular preacher, her husband, the 

120 



The Dramatist 



other a wild and weak young poet, logically 
tutile and physically timid, her lover; and she 
chooses the former because he has more weak- 
ness and more need of her. Even among the 
plain and ringing paradoxes of the Shaw plav 
this IS one of the best reversals or turnovers 
ever effected. A paradoxical writer like Ber- 
nard Shaw is perpetually and tiresomely told 
that he stands on his head, But all romance 
and all religion consist in making the whole 
universe stand on its head. That reversal is 
the whole idea of virtue; that the last shall 
be first and the first last. Considered as a 
pure piece of Shaw therefore, the thing is of 
the best. But it is also something much 
better than Shaw. The writer touches certain 
realities commonly outside his scope; especi- 
ally the reality of the normal wife's attitude to 
the normal husband, an attitude which is not 
romantic but which is yet quite quixotic; 
which is insanely unselfish and yet quite cynic- 
ally clear-sighted. It involves human sacrifice 
without in the least involving idolatry. 

The truth is that in this place Bernard 
Shaw comes within an inch of expressing 
something that is not properly expressed any- 
where else; the idea of marriage. Marriage 
is not a mere chain upon love as the anarchists 

121 



George Beriiard Shaw 



say; nor is it a mere crown upon love as tlie 
sentimentalists say. Marriage is a fact, an 
actual human relation like that of motherhood 
which has certain human habits and loyalties, 
except in a few monstrous cases where it is 
turned to torture by special insanity and sin. 
A marriage is neither an ecstasy nor a slavery; 
it is a commonwealth; it is a separate working 
and fighting thing like a nation. Kings and 
diplomatists talk ol "forming alliances" when 
they make weddings; bur indeed every wed- 
ding is primarily an alliance. The family is a 
fact even when it is not an agreeable fact, and 
a man is part of his wife even when he wishes 
he wasn't. The twain are one Hesh — yes, 
even when they are not one spirit. Man is 
duplex. Man is a quadruped. 

Of this ancient and essential relation there 
are certain emotional results, which are subtle, 
like all the growths of nature. And one of 
them is the attitude of the wife to the husband, 
whom she regards at once as the strongest and 
most helpless of human figures. She regards 
him in some strange fashion at once as a 
w^arrior who must make his way and as an 
infant who is sure to lose his way. The man 
has emotions which exactly correspond; some- 
times looking down at his wife and sometimes 

122 



The Dramatist 



.11) at her; for marriage is like a splendid 
i^aine of see-saw. Whatever else it is, it is 
not comradeship. This living, ancestral bond 
(not of love or fear, but strictly of marriage) 
has been twice expressed splendidly in litera- 
ture. The man's incurable sense of the 
mother in his lawful wife was uttered by 
Browning in one of his tvvo or three truly 
shattering lines of genius, when he makes the 
execrable Guido fall back finally upon the fact 
of maniage and the wife whom he has trodden 
like mire: 

"Christ! Maria! God, 
Pompilia, will you let them murder me V 

And the woman's witness to the same fact 
has been best expressed by Bernard Shaw in 
this great scene where she remains with the 
great stalwart successful public man because 
he is really too little to run alone. 

There are one or two errors in the play; 
and they are all due to the primary error of 
despising the mental attitude of romance, which 
is the only key to real human conduct. For 
instance, the love making of the young poet is 
all wrong. He is supposed to be a romantic 
and amorous boy; and therefore the dramatist 
tries to make him talk turgidly, about seeking 

123 



George Bernard Shaw 



for "an archangel with purple wings" who 
shall be worthy of his lady. But a lad in love 
would never talk in this mock heroic style; 
there is no period at which the young male is 
more sensitive and serious and afraid of look- 
ing a fool. This is a blunder; but there is 
another much bigger and blacker. It is com- 
pletely and disastrously false to the whole 
nature of falling in love to make the Aoung 
Eugene complain of the cruelty which makes 
Candida defile her fair hands with domestic 
duties. No boy in love with a beautiful 
woman would ever feel disgusted when she 
peeled potatoes or trimmed lamps. He would 
like her to be domestic. He would simply 
feel that the potatoes had become poetical and 
the lamps gained an extra light. This may be 
irrational; but we are not talking of ration- 
ality, but of the psychology of first love. It 
may be very unfair to women that the toil 
and triviality of potato peeling should be seen 
through a glamour of romance; but the 
glamour is quite as certain a fact as the 
potatoes. It may be a bad thing in sociology 
that men should deify domesticity in girls as 
something dainty and magical; but all men 
do. Personally I do not think it a bad thing 
at all; but that is another argument. The 
124 



Tlie Dramatist 



argument here is that Bernard Shaw, in aim- 
ing at mere realism, makes a big mistake in 
reality. Misled by his great heresy of looking 
at emotions from the outside, he makes Eu- 
gene a cold-blooded prig at the very moment 
when he is trying, for his own dramatic pur- 
poses, to make him a hot-blooded lover. 
He makes the young lover an idealistic the- 
oriser about the very things about which he 
really would have been a sort of mystical 
materialist. Here the romantic Irishman is 
much more right than the very rational one; 
and there is far more truth to life as it is 
in Lover's couplet — 

"And envied the chicken 
That Peggy was pickin'." 

than in Eugene's solemn, aesthetic protest 
against the potato-skins and the lamp-oil. 
For dramatic purposes, G. B. S., even if he 
despises romance, ought to comprehend it. 
But then, if once he comprehended romance, 
he would not despise it. 

The series contained, besides its more sub- 
stantial work, tragic and comic, a compara- 
tive frivoHty called The Man of Destiny. It 
IS a little comedy about Napoleon, and is 
chiefl\- interestino; as a foreshadowino; of his 

125 



George Bernard Shaw 



after sketches of heroes and strong men; it 
is a kind of parody of Ccesar and Cleopatra 
before it was written. In this connection 
the mere title of this Napoleonic play is of 
interest. All Shaw's generation and school of 
thought remembered Napoleon only by his 
late and corrupt title of "The Man of 
Destiny," a title only given to him when he 
was already fat and tired and destined to exile. 
They forgot that through all the really thrill- 
ing and creative part of his career he was not 
the man of destiny, but the man who defied 
destiny. Shaw's sketch is extraordinarily 
clever; but it is tinged with this unmilitary 
notion of an inevitable conquest; and this we 
must remember when we come to those larger 
canvases on which he painted his more serious 
heroes. As for the play, it is packed w^ith 
good things, of which the last is perhaps the 
best. The long duologue between Bonaparte 
and the Irish lady ends with the General 
declaring that he will only be beaten when 
he meets an Enghsh army under an Irish 
general. It has always been one of Shaw's 
paradoxes that the English mind has the force to 
fulfil orders, while the Irish mind has the intel- 
ligence to give them, and it is among those 
of his paradoxes which contain a certain truth. 



126 ? 



The Dramatist 



A far more important play is The Philanderer, 
an ironic comedy which is full of fine strokes 
and real satire; it is more especially the 
vehicle of some of Shaw's best satire upon 
physical science. Nothing could be cleverer 
than the picture of the young, strenuous 
doctor, in the utter innocence of his profes- 
sional ambition, who has discovered a new 
disease, and is delighted when he finds people 
suffering from it and cast down to despair 
when he finds that it does not exist. The 
point is worth a pause, because it is a good, 
short way of stating Shaw's attitude, right or 
wrong, upon the whole of formal morality. 
What he dislikes in young Doctor Paramore 
is that he has interposed a secondary and false 
conscience between himself and the facts. 
When his disease is disproved, instead of 
seeing the escape of a human being who 
thought he was going to die of it, Paramore 
sees the downfall of a kind of flao; or cause. 
This is the whole contention of The Quin- 
tessence of Ibsentsw, put better than the book 
puts it; it is a really sharp exposition of the 
dangers of "idealism," the sacrifice of people 
to principles, and Shaw is even wiser in his 
suggestion that this excessive idealism exists 
no.where so strongly as in the world of 
127 



George Bernard Shaw 



physical science. He shows that the scientist 
tends to be more concerned about the sickness 
than about the sick man; but it was certainly 
in his mind to suggest here also that the 
idealist is more concerned about the sin than 
about the sinner. 

This business of Dr. Paramore's disease 
while it is the most farcical thing in the play 
is also the most philosophic and important. 
The rest of the figures, including the Philan- 
derer himself, are in the full sense of those 
blasting and obliterating words "funny with- 
out being vulgar," that is, funny without 
being of any importance to the masses of 
men. It is a play about a dashing and ad- 
vanced "Ibsen Club," and the squabble 
between the young Ibsenites and the old 
people who are not yet up to Ibsen. It 
would be hard to find a stronger example of 
Shaw's only essential error, modernity — 
which means the seeking for truth m terms 
of time. Only a few years have passed and 
already almost half the wit of that wonderful 
play is wasted, because it all turns on the 
newness of a fashion that is no longer new. 
Doubtless many people still think the Ibsen 
drama a great thing, like the French classical 
drama. But goino- to " The Philanderer" is like 

128 



The Dramatist 



going among periwigs and rapiers and hearing 
that the young men are now all for Racine. 
What makes such work sound unreal is not the 
praise of Ibsen, but the praise of the novelty 
of Ibsen. Any advantage that Bernard Shaw 
had over Colonel Craven I have over Bernard 
Shaw; we w^ho happen to be born last have 
the meaningless and paltry triumph in that 
meaningless and paltry war. We are the 
superiors by that silliest and most snobbish 
of all superiorities, the mere aristocracy of 
time. All works must become thus old and 
insipid which have ever tried to be "modern," 
which have consented to smell of time rather 
than of eternity. Only those who have 
stooped to be in advance of their time will 
ever find themselves behind it. 

But it is irritating to think what diamonds, 
what dazzling silver of Shavian wit has been 
sunk in such an out-of-date warship. In The 
Philanderer there are five hundred excellent 
and about five magnificent things. The rattle 
of repartees between the doctor and the 
soldier about the humanity of their two trades 
is admirable. Or again, when the colonel tells 
Chartaris that "in his young days" he would 
have no more behaved like Chartaris than he 
would have cheated at cards. After a pause 

I 129 



George Bernard Shaw 



Chartaiis says, "You're getting old, Craven, 
and you make a virtue of it as usual." And 
there is an altitude of aerial tragedy in the 
words of Grace, who has refused the man she 
loves, to Julia, who is marrying the man 
she doesn't, "This is v\hat they call a happy 
ending — these men." 

There is an acrid taste in The Phi/ainlfrer; 
and certainly he might be considered a super- 
sensitive person who should find anything acrid 
in Tou Never Can Tell. This play is the nearest 
approach to frank and objectless exuberance in 
the whole of Shaw's work. Punch, with wisdom 
as well as wit, said that it might well be called 
not "You Never Can Tell" but "You Never 
Can be Shaw." And }'et if anyone w^ill read this 
blazing farce and then after it any of the romantic 
farces, such as Pickwick or even The Wrong Box, 
I do not think he will be disposed to erase or even 
to modify what I said at the beginning about 
the ingrained grimness and even inhumanity 
of Shaw's art. To take but one test: love, in 
an "extravaganza," may be light love or love 
in idleness, but it should be hearty and happy 
love if it is to add to the general hilarity. 
Such are the ludicrous but lucky love affairs of 
the sportsman Winkle and the Maestro jimson. 
In Gloria's collapse before her bullying lover 

130 



The Dramatist 



there is something at once cold and unclean; 
it calls up all the modern supermen with their 
cruel and fishy eyes. Such farces should begin 
in a friendly air, in a tavern. There is some- 
thing very symbolic of Shaw in the fact that 
his farce begins in a dentist's. 

The only one out of this brilliant batch of 
plays in which I think that the method adopted 
really fails, is the one called JVidowers 
Houses. The best touch of Shaw is simply 
in the title. The simple substitution of 
widowers for widows contains almost the 
whole bitter and yet boisterous protest of 
Shaw; all his preference for undignified fact 
over dignified phrase; all his dislike of those 
subtle trends of sex or mystery which swing 
the logician off the straight line. We can 
imagine him crying, "Why in the name of 
death and conscience should it be tragic to be 
a widow but comic to be a widower.?" But 
the rationalistic method is here applied quite 
wrong as regards the production of a drama. 
The most dramatic point in the affair is when 
the open and indecent rack-renter turns on the 
decent young man of means and proves to him 
that he is equally guilty, that he also can only 
grind his corn by grinding the faces of the 
poor. But even here the point is undramatic 

131 



George Bernard Shaw 



because it is indirect; it is indirect because it 
is merely sociological. It may be the truth 
that a young man living on an unexamined 
income which ultimately covers a great deal of 
house-property is as dangerous as any despot 
or thief. But it is a truth that you can no 
more put into a play than into a triolet. You 
can make a play out of one man robbing 
another man, but not out of one man robbing 
a million men; still less out of his robbing 
them unconsciously. 

Of the plays collected in this book I have 
kept Mrs. Warrens Profession to the last, 
because, fine as it is, it is even finer and more 
important because of its fate, which was to 
rouse a long and serious storm and to be vetoed 
by the Censor of Plays. I say that this drama 
is most important because of the quarrel that 
came out of it. If I were speaking of some 
mere artist this might be an insult. But there 
are high and heroic things in Bernard Shaw; 
and one of the highest and most heroic is this, 
that he certainly cares much more for a quarrel 
than for a play. And this quarrel about the 
censorship is one on which he feels so strongly 
that in a book embodying any sort of sympathy 
It would be much better to leave out Mrs. 
Warren than to leave out Mr. Redford. The 

132 



The Dramatist 



veto was the pivot of so very personal a 
niovement by the dramatist, of so very positive 
an assertion of his own attitude towards things, 
that it is only just and necessary to state what 
were the two essential parties to the dispute; 
the play and the official who prevented the 
play. 

The play oi Mrs. Warren's Profession is con- 
cerned with a coarse mother and a cold daughter; 
the mother drives the ordinary and dirty trade 
of harlotry; the daughter does not know until 
the end the atrocious origin of all her own 
comfort and refinement. The daughter, when 
the discovery is made, freezes up into an ice- 
berg of contempt; which is indeed a very 
womanly thing to do. The mother explodes 
into pulverising cynicism and practicality; 
which is also very womanly. The dialogue is 
drastic and sweeping; the daughter says the 
trade is loathsome; the mother answers that 
she loathes it herself; that every healthy per- 
son does loathe the trade by which she lives. 
And beyond question the general effect of the 
play is that the trade is loathsome; supposing 
anyone to be so insensible as to require to be 
told of the fact. Undoubtedly the upshot is 
that a brothel is a miserable business, and 
a brothel-keeper a miserable woman. The 

133 



George Bernard Shaw 



whole dramatic art of Shaw is in the Hteral 
sense of the word, tragi-comic; I mean that 
the comic part comes after the tragedy. But 
just as Tou Never Can Tell represents the 
nearest approach of Shaw to the purely comic, 
so Mrs. Warre77^ s Profession represents his only 
complete, or nearly complete, tragedy. There 
is no twopenny modernism in it, as in The 
Philanderer. Mrs. Warren is as old as the Old 
Testament; "for she hath cast down many 
wounded, yea, many strong men have been 
slain by her; her house is in the gates of hell, 
going down into the chamber of death." Here 
is no subtle ethics, as in Widowers' Houses; for 
even those moderns who think it noble that a 
woman should throw away her honour, surelv 
cannot think it especially noble that she should 
sell it. Here is no lighting up by laughter, 
astonishment, and happy coincidence, as in Tou 
Never Can Tell. The play is a pure tragedy 
about a permanent and quite plain human 
problem; the problem is as plain and perma- 
nent, the tragedy is as proud and pure, as in 
(Edipus or Macbeth. This play was presented 
in the ordinary way for public performance 
and was suddenly stopped by the Censor of 
Plays. 

The Censor of Plays is a small and acci- 

134 



The Dramatist 



dental eighteenth-century official. Like nearly 
all the powers which Englishmen now respect 
as ancient and rooted, he is very recent. 
Novels and newspapers still talk of the English 
aristocracy that came over with William the 
Conqueror. Little of our effective oligarchy 
is as old as the Reformation; and none of it 
came over with William the Conqueror. Some 
of the older English landlords came over with 
William of Orange; the rest have come by 
ordinary alien immigration. In the same way 
we always talk of the Victorian woman (with 
her smelling salts and sentiment) as the old- 
fashioned woman. But she really was a quite 
new-fashioned woman; she considered herself, 
and was, an advance in delicacy and civilisa- 
tion upon the coarse and candid Elizabethan 
woman to whom we are now returning. We 
are never oppressed by old things; it is recent 
things that can really oppress. And in accord- 
ance \\\t\\ this principle modern England has 
accepted, as if it were a part of perennial 
morality, a tenth-rate job of Walpole's worst 
days called the Censorship of the Drama. Just 
as they have supposed the eighteenth-century 
parvenus to date from Hastings, just as they 
have supposed the eighteenth-century ladies 
to date from Eve, so they have supposed the 

135 



George Bernard Shaw 



eighteenth-century Censorship to chite from 
Sinai. The origin of the thing was in truth 
j3urely political. Its first and principal achieve- 
ment was to prevent Fielding from writing 
plays; not at all because the plays were coarse, 
but because they criticised the Government. 
Fielding was a free writer; but they did not 
resent his sexual freedom; the Censor would 
not have objected if he had torn away the most 
intimate curtains of decency or rent the last 
rag from private life. What the Censor dis- 
liked was his rending the curtain from public 
life. There is still much of that spirit in our 
country; there are no affairs which men seek 
so much to cover up as public affairs. But 
the thing was done somewhat more boldl}' 
and baldly in Walpole's day; and the Censor- 
ship of plays has its origin, not merely in 
tyranny, but in a quite trifling and temporary 
and partisan piece of tyranny; a thing in its 
nature far more ephemeral, far less essential, 
than Ship Money. Perhaps its brightest moment 
was when the office of censor was held by that 
filthy writer, Colman the younger; and when 
he gravely refused to license a work by the 
author oi Our Village. Few funnier notions 
can ever have actually been facts than this 
notion that the restraint and chastitv of George 



136 



The Dramatist 



Cclman saved the English public from the 
eroticism and obscenity of Miss Mitford. 

Such was the play; and such was the power 
that stopped the play. A private man WTOte 
It: another private man forbade it; nor was 
there any difference between Mr. Shav/'s au- 
thority and Mr. Redford's, except that Mr. 
Shaw did defend his action on public grounds 
and Mr. Redford did not. The dramatist had 
simply been suppressed by a despot; and what 
was worse (because it was modern) by a silent 
and evasive despot; a despot in hiding. 
People talk about the pride of tyrants; but 
we at the present day suffer from the modesty 
of tyrants; from the shyness and the shrink- 
ing secrecy of the strong. Shaw's preface to 
Mrs. fFarren's Profession was far more fit to be 
called a public document than the slovenly 
refusal of the individual official; it had more 
exactness, more universal application, more 
authority. Shaw on Redford was far more 
national and responsible than Redford on 
Shaw. 

The dramatist found in the quarrel one ot 
the important occasions of his life, because 
the crisis called out something in him which is 
in many ways his highest quality — righteous 
indignation. As a mere matter of the art of 

^37 



George Bernard Shaw 



controversy of course he carried the war into 
the enemy's camp at once. He did not linger 
over loose excuses for licence; he declared at 
once that the Censor was licentious, while he, 
Bernard Shaw, was clean. He did not discuss 
whether a Censorship ought to make the 
drama moral. He declared that it made the 
drama immoral. With a fine strategic audacity 
he attacked the Censor quite as much for what 
he permitted as for what he prevented. He 
charged him with encouraging all plays that 
attracted men to vice and only stopping those 
which discouraged them from it. Nor was 
this attitude hy any means an idle paradox. 
Many plays appear (as Shaw pointed out) in 
which the prostitute and the procuress are 
practically obvious, and in which they are 
represented as revelling in beautiful surround- 
ings and basking in brilliant popularity. The 
crime of Shaw was not that he introduced the 
Gaiety Girl; that had been done, with little 
enough decorum, in a hundred musical come- 
dies. The crime of Shaw was that he intro- 
duced the Gaiety Girl, but did not represent 
her life as all gaiety. The pleasures of vice 
were already flaunted before the playgoers. 
It was the perils of vice that were carefully 
concealed from them. The gay adventures, 

138 



The Dramatist 



the c;orgeous dresses, the champagne and 
oysters, the diamonds and motor-cars, drama- 
tists were allowed to drag all these dazzling 
temptations before any silly housemaid in the 
gallery who was grumbling at her wages. But 
they were not allowed to warn her of the vul- 
garity and the nausea, the dreary deceptions 
and the blasting diseases of that Hfe. Mrs. 
Warren s Profession was not up to a sufficient 
standard of immorality; it was not spicy 
enough to pass the Censor. The acceptable 
and the accepted plays were those w^hich made 
the fall of a woman fashionable and fascinating; 
for all the world as if the Censor's profession 
were the same as Mrs. Warren's profession. 

Such was the angle of Shaw's energetic 
attack; and it is not to be denied that there 
was exaggeration in it, and what is so much 
worse, omission. The argument might easily 
be carried too far; it might end with a scene 
of screaming torture in the Inquisition as a 
corrective to the too amiable view of a clergy- 
man in The Private Secretary. But the con- 
troversy is definitely worth recording, it only 
as an excellent example of the author's 
aggressive attitude and his love of turning 
the tables in debate. Moreover, though this 
point of view involves a potential overstate- 

139 



George Bernard Shaw 



ment, it also involves an important truth. 
One of the best points urged in the course of 
it was this, that though vice is punished in 
conventional drama, the punishment is not 
really impressive, because it is not inevit- 
able or even probable. It does not arise out 
of the evil act. Years afterwards Bernard 
Shaw urged this ariiument again in connec- 
tion with his friend Mr. Granville Barker's 
play of Waste, in which the woman dies from 
an illegal operation. Bernard Shaw said, truly 
enough, that if she had died from poison or a 
pistol shot it would have left everyone un- 
moved, for pistols do not in their nature 
follow female unchastity. Illegal operations 
very often do. The punishment was one 
which might follow the crime, not only in 
that case, but in many cases. Here, I think, 
the whole argument might be sufficiently 
cleared up by saying that the objection to 
such things on the stage is a purely artistic 
objection. There is nothing wrong in talk- 
ing about an illegal operation; there are 
plenty of occasions when it would be very 
wrong not to talk about it. But it may 
easily be )ust a shade too ugly for the shape 
of any work of art. There is nothing wrong 
atout being sick; but if Bernard Shaw wrote 
140 ; 



The Dramatist 



a plav in which all the characters expressed 
their disHke of animal food by vomiting on 
the stage, I think we should be justified in 
saying that the thing was outside, not the 
laws of morality, but the framework of 
civilised literature. The instinctive move- 
ment of repulsion which everyone has when 
hearing of the operation in Waste is not an 
ethical repulsion at all. But it is an cTsthetic 
repulsion, and a right one. 

But I have only dwelt on this particular 
fighting phase because it leaves us facing the 
ultimate characteristics which 1 mentioned first. 
Bernard Shaw cares nothing for art; in com- 
parison with morals, literally nothing. Bernard 
Shaw is a Puritan and his work is Puritan 
work. He has all the essentials of the old, 
virile and extinct Protestant type. In his 
work he is as ugly as a Puritan. He is as 
indecent as a Puritan. He is as full of gross 
words and sensual facts as a sermon of the 
seventeenth century. Up to this point of his 
life mdeed hardly anyone would have dreamed 
ot calhng him a Puritan; he was called some- 
times an anarchist, sometimes a buffoon, some- 
tunes (by the more discerning stupid people) 
a prig. His attitude towards current problems 
was telt to be arresting and even indecent; I 

141 



George Bernard Shaw 



do not think that anyone thought of connect- 
ing it with the old Calvinistic morality. But 
Shaw, who knew better than the Shavians, w^as 
at this moment on the very eve of confessing 
his moral origin. The next book of plays 
he produced (including The DcviFs Disciple, 
Captain Brassbound\^ Conversion, and Ccesar and 
Cleopatra), actually bore the title of Plays for 
Puritans. 

The play called The Devil's Disciple has great 
merits, but the merits are incidental. Some 
of its jokes are serious and important, but its 
general plan can only be called a joke. Almost 
alone among Bernard Shaw's plays (except of 
course such things as Hotu he Lied to her Hus- 
band and The Adniirablr Bashville) this drama 
does not turn on any very plain pivot of 
ethical or philosophical conviction. The artis- 
tic idea seems to be the notion of a melodrama 
m which all the conventional melodramatic 
situations shall suddenly take unconventional 
turns. Just where the melodramatic clergy- 
man would show courage he appears to show 
cowardice; just where the melodramatic sinner 
would confess his love he confesses his in- 
difference. This is a little too like the Shaw 
of the newspaper critics rather than the Shaw 
of reality. There are indeed present in the 

142 



The Dramatist 



play two of the writer's principal moral con- 
ceptions. The first is the idea of a great 
heroic action coming in a sense from nowhere; 
that is, not coming from any commonplace 
motive; being born in the soul in naked 
beauty, coming with its own authority and 
testifying only to itself. Shaw's agent does 
not act tow^ards something, but from some- 
thing. The hero dies, not because he desires 
heroism, but because he has it. So in this 
particular play the Devil's Disciple finds that 
his own nature will not permit him to put the 
rope around another man's neck; he has no 
reasons of desire, affection, or even equity; his 
death is a sort of divine whim. And in con- 
nection with this the dramatist introduces 
another favourite moral; the objection to per- 
petual playing upon the motive of sex. He 
deliberately lures the onlooker into the net of 
Cupid in order to tell him with salutary 
decision that Cupid is not there at all. Mil- 
lions of melodramatic dramatists have made a 
man face death for the woman he loves; Shaw 
makes him face death for the woman he does 
not love — merely in order to put woman in 
her place. He objects to that idolatry of 
sexualism which makes it the fountain of all 
forcible enthusiasms; he dislikes the amorous 



George Bernard Shaic 



drama which makes the female the only key to 
the male. He is Feminist in politics, but 
Anti-feminist in emotion. His key to most 
problems is, "Ne cherchez pas la femme." 

As has been observed, the incidental felici- 
ties of the play are frequent and memorable, 
especially those connected with the character 
of General Burgoyne, the real full-blooded, 
free-thinking eighteenth century gentleman, 
who was much too much of an aristocrat not 
to be a liberal. One of the best thrusts in 
all the Shavian fencing matches is that which 
occurs when Richard Dudgeon, condemned to 
be hanged, asks rhetorically why he cannot be 
shot like a soldier. "Now there you speak 
like a civiHan," replies General Burgoyne. 
"Have you formed any conception of the 
condition of marksmanship in the British 
Army?" Excellent, too, is the passage in 
which his subordinate speaks of crushing the 
enemy in America, and Burgoyne asks him 
who will crush their enemies in England, 
snobbery and jobbery and incurable careless- 
ness and sloth. And in one sentence towards 
the end, Shaw reaches a wider and more genial 
comprehension of mankind than he shows 
anywhere else; "it takes all sorts to make a 
world, saints as well as soldiers." If Shaw 

144 



The Dramatist 



liad remembered that sentence on other occa- 
sions he would have avoided his mistake 
about Caesar and Brutus. It is not only true 
that it takes all sorts to make a world; but 
the world cannot succeed without its failures. 
Perhaps the most doubtful point of all in the 
play is why it is a play for Puritans; except 
the hideous picture of a Calvinistic home is 
meant to destroy Puritanism. And indeed in 
this connection it is constantly necessary to 
fall back upon the facts of which I have 
spoken at the beginning of this brief study; 
It is necessary especially to remember that 
Shaw could in all probability speak of Puritan- 
ism from the inside. In that domestic circle 
which took him to hear Moody and Sankey, 
in that domestic circle which was teetotal even 
when it was intoxicated, in that atmosphere 
and society Shaw might even have met the 
monstrous mother in The Devil's Disciple, 
the horrible old woman who declares that she 
has hardened her heart to hate her children, 
because the heart of man is desperately wicked, 
the old ghoul who has made one of her chil- 
dren an imbecile and the other an outcast. 
Such types do occur in small societies drunk 
with the dismal wine of Puritan determinism. 
It is possible that there were among Irish 
K 145 



George Bernard Shaw 



Calvinists people who denied that charity was 
a Christian virtue. It is possible that among 
Puritans there were people who thought a 
heart was a kind of heart disease. But it is 
enough to make one tear one's hair to think 
that a man of genius received his first im- 
pressions in so small a corner of Europe that 
he could for a long time suppose that this 
Puritanism was current among Christian men. 
The question, however, need not detain us, 
for the batch of plays contained two others 
about which it is easier to speak. 

The third play in order in the series called 
Plays for Puritans is a very charming one; 
Captain Brassbound's Conversion. This also 
turns, as does so much of the Caesar drama, on 
the idea of vanity of revenge— the idea that 
it is too slight and silly a thing for a man 
to allow to occupy and corrupt his conscious- 
ness. It is not, of course, the morality that 
is new here, but the touch of cold laughter 
in the core of the morality. Many saints and 
sages have denounced vengeance. But they 
treated vengeance as something too great for 
man. "Vengeance is Mine, saith the Lord; 
I will repay." Shaw treats vengeance as some- 
thing too small for man— a monkey trick he 
ought to have outlived, a childish storm 

146 



The Dramatist 



of tears which he ought to be able to control. 
In the story in question Captain Brassbound 
has nourished through his whole erratic exist- 
ence, racketting about all the unsavoury parts 
of Africa — a mission of private punishment 
which appears to him as a mission of holy 
justice. His mother has died in consequence 
of a judge's decision, and Brassbound roams 
and schemes until the judge falls into his 
hands. Then a pleasant society lady, Lady 
Cicely Waynefleet tells him in an easy con- 
versational undertone — a rivulet of speech 
which ripples while she is mending his coat- 
that he is making a fool of himself, that his 
wrong is irrelevant, that his vengeance is 
objectless, that he would be much better if he 
flung his morbid fancy away for ever; in 
short, she tells him he is ruining himself for 
the sake of ruining a total stranger. Here 
again we have the note of the economist, the 
hatred of mere loss. Shaw (one might almost 
say) dislikes murder, not so much because it 
wastes the life of the corpse as because it 
wastes the time of the murderer. If he were 
endeavouring to persuade one of his moon- 
lighting fellow-countrymen not to shoot his 
landlord, I can imagine him explaining with 
benevolent emphasis that it was not so much 

147 



George Bernard Sliaio 



2L question of losing a life as of throwing away 
a bullet. But indeed the Irish comparison 
alone suggests a doubt which wriggles in the 
recesses of my mind about the complete re- 
liability of the philosophy of Lady Cicely 
Waynefleet, the complete finality of the moral 
of Captain Brasshoiind' s Conversion. Of course, 
it was very natural in an aristocrat like Lady 
Cicely Waynefleet to wish to let sleeping dogs 
lie, especially those whom Mr. Blatchford calls 
under-dogs. Of course it was natural for her 
to wish everything to be smooth and sweet- 
tempered. But 1 have the obstinate question 
in the corner of my brain, whether if a few 
Captain Brassbounds did revenge themselves 
on judges, the quality of our judges might not 
materially improve. 

When this doubt is once off one's conscience 
one can lose oneself in the bottomless beati- 
tude of Lady Cicely Waynefleet, one of the 
most living and laughing things that her 
maker has made. I do not know any stronger 
way of stating the beauty of the character than 
by saying that it was written specially for 
Ellen Terry, and that it is, with Beatrice, one 
of the very few characters in which the drama- 
tist can claim some part of her triumph. 

We may now pass to the more important 

148 



The Dramatu't 



of the plays. For some time Bernard Shaw 
would seem to have been brooding upon the 
soul of Julius Caesar. There must always be 
a strong human curiosity about the soul of 
Julius Caesar; and, among other things, about 
whether he had a soul. The conjunction of 
Shaw and Caesar has about it something 
smooth and inevitable; for this decisive reason, 
that Caesar is really the only great man of 
history to whom the Shaw theories apply. 
Caesar was a Shaw hero. Caesar was merciful 
without being in the least pitiful; his mercy 
was colder than justice. Ciesar was a con- 
queror without being in any hearty sense a 
soldier; his courage was lonelier than fear. 
CiPsar was a demagogue without being a 
democrat. In the same way Bernard Shaw is 
a demagogue without being a democrat. If 
he had tried to prove his principle from any 
of the other heroes or sages of mankind he 
would have found it much more difficult. 
Napoleon achieved more miraculous conquest; 
but during his most conquering epoch he was 
a burnmg boy suicidally in love with a woman 
far beyond his age. Joan of Arc achieved 
far more instant and incredible worldly suc- 
cess; but Joan of Arc achieved worldly 
success because she believed in another world, 
149 



George Bernard Shaw 



Nelson was a figure fully as fascinating and 
dramatically decisive; but Nelson was "ro- 
mantic"; Nelson was a devoted patriot and a 
devoted lover. Alexander was passionate; 
Cromwell could shed tears; Bismarck had 
some suburban religion; Frederick was a 
poet; Charlemagne was fond of children. 
But Julius Caesar attracted Shaw not less by 
his positive than by his negative enormous- 
ness. Nobody can say with certainty that 
Caesar cared for anything. It is unjust to call 
Caesar an egoist; for there is no proof that he 
cared even for Caesar. He may not have been 
either an atheist or a pessimist. But he may 
have been; that is exactly the rub. He may 
have been an ordinary decently good man 
slightly deficient in spiritual expansiveness. 
On the other hand, he may have been the 
incarnation of paganism in the sense that 
Christ was the incarnation of Christianity. As 
Christ expressed how great a man can be 
humble and humane, Caesar may have ex- 
pressed how great a man can be frigid and 
flippant. According to most legends Anti- 
christ was to come soon after Christ. One 
has only to suppose that Antichrist came 
shortly before Christ; and Antichrist might 
very well be Caesar. 

150 



live Dramatist 



It is, I think, no injustice to Bernard Shaw 
to say that he does not attempt to make his 
Caesar superior except in this naked and nega- 
tive sense. There is no suggestion, as there 
is in the Jehovah of the Old Testament, that 
the very cruelty of the higher being conceals 
some tremendous and even tortured love. 
Caesar is superior to other men not because 
he loves more, but because he hates less. 
Csesar is magnanimous not because he is 
warm-hearted enough to pardon, but because 
he is not warm-hearted enough to avenge. 
There is no suggestion anywhere in the play 
that he is hiding any great genial purpose or 
powerful tenderness towards men. In order 
to put this point beyond a doubt the dramatist 
has introduced a soliloquy of Caesar alone with 
the Sphinx. There if anywhere he would 
have broken out into ultimate brotherhood or 
burning pity for the people. But in that 
scene between the Sphinx and Caesar, Caesar is 
as cold and as lonely and as dead as the 
Sphinx. 

But whether the Shavian Caesar is a sound 
ideal or no, there can be little doubt that he is 
a very fine reality. Shaw has done nothing 
greater as a piece of artistic creation. If the 
man is a little like a statue, it is a statue by a 

•5' 



George Bernard Shaw 



great sculptor; a statue of the best period. 
If his nobility is a little negative in its char- 
acter, it is the negative darkness of the great 
dome of night; not as in some "new mor- 
alities" the mere mystery of the coal-hole. 
Indeed, this somewhat austere method of work 
is very suitable to Shaw when he is serious. 
There is nothing Gothic about his real genius; 
he could not build a mediaeval cathedral in 
which laughter and terror are twisted together 
in stone, molten by mystical passion. He can 
build, by way of amusement, a Chinese pagoda; 
but when he is in earnest, only a Roman 
temple. He has a keen eye for truth; but he 
is one of those people who like, as the saying 
goes, to put down the truth in black and 
white. He is aWays girding and jeering at 
romantics and idealists because they will not 
put down the truth in black and white. But 
black and white are not the only two colours 
in the world. The modern man of science 
who writes down a fact in black and white is 
not more but less accurate than the mediaeval 
monk who wrote it down in gold and scarlet, 
sea-green and turquoise. Nevertheless, it is a 
good thing that the more austere method 
should exist separately, and that some men 
should be specially good at it. Bernard Shaw 

15^ 



Tlic Dramatist 



is specially good at it; he is pre-eminently a 
black and white artist. 

And as a study in black and white nothing 
could be better than this sketch of Julius 
Ciesar. He is not so much represented as 
"bestriding the earth Hke a Colossus" (which 
is indeed a rather comic attitude for a hero to 
stand in), but rather walking the earth with 
a sort of stern levity, lightly touching the 
planet and yet spurning it away like a stone. 
He walks like a winged man who has chosen 
to fold his wings. There is something creepy 
even about his kindness; it makes the men 
in front of him feel as if they were made ot 
glass. The nature of the Caesarian mercy 
is massively suggested. Caesar dislikes a 
massacre, not because it is a great sin, but 
because it is a small sin. It is felt that he 
classes it with a flirtation or a fit of the sulks; 
a senseless temporary subjugation of man's 
permanent purpose by his passing and trivial 
feelings. He will plunge into slaughter for 
a great purpose, just as he plunges into the 
sea. But to be stung into such action he 
deems as undignified as to be tipped off the 
pier. In a singularly fine passage Cleopatra, 
having hired assassins to stab an enemy, 
appeals to her wrongs as justifying her 

153 



George Bernard Shaw 



revenge, and says, "If you can find one man 
in all Africa who says that I did wrong, I will 
be crucified by my own slaves." "If you 
can find one man in all the world," replies 
Caesar, "who can see that you did wrong, he 
will either conquer the world as I have done 
or be crucified by it." i hat is the high water 
mark of this heathen sublimity; and we do 
not feel it inappropriate, or unlike Shaw, 
when a few minutes afterwards the hero is 
saluted with a blaze of swords. 

As usually happens in the author's works, 
there is even more about Julius Caesar in the 
preface than there is in the play. But in the 
preface I think the portrait is less imaginative 
and more fanciful. He attempts to connect 
his somewhat chilly type of superman with 
the heroes of the old fairy tales. But Shav/ 
should not talk about the fairy tales; for he 
does not feel them from the inside. As 1 
have said, on all this side of historic and 
domestic traditions Bernard Shaw is weak and 
deficient. He does not approach them as 
fairy tales, as if he were four, but as "folk- 
lore" as if he were forty. And he makes 
a big mistake about them which he would 
never have made if he had kept his birthday 
and hung up his stocking, and generally kept 

154 



TJic Dramaii.t 



alive inside him the firelight of a home. 
The point is so peculiarly characteristic of 
Bernard Shaw, and is indeed so much of a 
summary of his most interesting assertion and 
his most interesting error, that it deserves 
a word by itself, though it is a word which 
must be remembered in connection with nearly 
all the other plays. 

His primary and defiant proposition is the 
Calvinistic proposition: that the elect do not 
earn virtue, but possess it. The goodness of 
a man does not consist in trying to be good, 
but in being good. Julius Caesar prevails over 
other people by possessing more virtus than 
they; not by having striven or suffered or 
bought his virtue; not because he has 
struggled heroically, but because he is a hero. 
So far Bernard Shaw is only what I have 
called him at the beginning; he is simply a 
seventeenth-century Calvinist. Caesar is not 
saved by works, or even by faith; he is saved 
because he is one of the elect. Unfortunately 
for himself, however, Bernard Shaw went back 
further than the seventeenth century; and 
professing his opinion to be yet more anti- 
quated, invoked the original legends of man- 
kind. He argued that when the fairy tales 
gave Jack the Giant Killer a coat of dark- 

155 



George Bernard Sliatr 



ness or a magic sword it removed all credit 
from Jack in the "common moral" sense; 
he won as Caesar won only because he was 
superior. I will confess, in passing, to the 
conviction that Bernard Shaw in the course of 
his w^hole simple and strenuous life was never 
quite so near to hell as at the moment when 
he wrote down those words. But m this 
question of fairy tales my immediate point is, 
not how near he was to hell, but how very far 
off he was from fairyland. That notion about 
the hero with a magic sword being the super- 
man with a magic superiority is the caprice 
of a pedant; no child, bo}', or man ever felt 
it in the story of jack the Giant Killer. 
Obviously the moral is all the other way. 
jack's fairy sword and invisible coat are 
clumsy expedients for enabling him to fight 
at all wMth something which is by nature 
stronger. They are a rough, savage substi- 
tute for psychological descriptions of special 
valour or unwearied patience. But no one in 
his five wits can doubt that the idea of "Jack 
the Giant Killer" is exactly the opposite to 
Shaw's idea. If it were not a tale of effort 
and triumph hardly earned it would not be 
called "Jack the Giant Killer." If it were a 
tale of the victory of natural advantages it 
156 



Tlic Dramatist 



would be called "Giant the Jack Killer." If 
the teller of fairy tales had merely wanted to 
urge that some beings are born stronger than 
others he would not have fallen back on 
elaborate tricks of weapon and costume for 
conquering an ogre. He would simply have 
let the ogre conquer. I will not speak of mv 
own emotions in connection with this in- 
credibly caddish doctrine that the strength of 
the strong is admirable, but not the valour 
ot the weak. It is enough to say that I have 
to summon up the physical presence of Shaw, 
his frank gestures, kind eyes, and exquisite 
Irish voice, to cure me of a mere sensation of 
contempt. But I do not dwell upon the point 
for any such purpose; but merely to show 
how we must be always casting back to those 
concrete foundations with w^hich we began. 
Bernard Shaw, as I have said, was never 
national enough to be domestic; he was 
never a part of his past; hence when he tries 
to interpret tradition he comes a terrible 
cropper, as in this case. Bernard Shaw (I 
strongly suspect) began to disbelieve in Santa 
Ciaus at a discreditably early age. And by 
this time Santa Claus has avenged himself by 
taking away the key of all the prehistoric 
scriptures; so that a noble and honourable 

157 



George Bernard Shaw 



artist flounders about like any German pro- 
fessor. Here is a whole fairy literature which 
is almost exclusively devoted to the unex- 
pected victory of the weak over the strong; 
and Bernard Shaw manages to make it mean 
the inevitable victory of the strong over the 
weak — which, among other things, would not 
make a story at all. It all comes of that 
mistake about not keeping his birthday. A 
man should be always t ed to his mother's 
apron strings; he should always have a hold 
on his childhood, and be ready at intervals to 
start anew from a childish standpoint. Theo- 
logically the thing is best expressed by saying, 
" ^'ou must be born again." Secularly it is 
best expressed by saying, "You must keep 
your birthday." Even if you will not be born 
again, at least remind yourself occasionally 
that you were born once. 

Some of the incidental wit in the Ca?sarian 
drama is excellent although it is upon the 
whole less spontaneous and perfect than in the 
previous plays. One of its jests may be men- 
tioned in passing, not merely to draw attention 
to its failure (though Shaw is brilliant enough 
to afi^ord many failures) but because it is the 
best opportunity for mentioning one of the 
writer's minor notions to which he obstinately 

I^8 



The Dramatist 



adheres. He describes the Ancient Briton in 
CiXsar's train as being exactly like a modern 
respectable Englishman. As a joke for a 
Christmas pantomime this would be all very 
well; but one expects the jokes of Bernard 
Shaw to have some intellectual root, however 
fantastic the flower. And obviously all historic 
common sense is against the idea that that dim 
Druid people, whoever they were, who dwelt 
in our land before it was lit up by Rome or 
loaded with varied invasions, were a precise 
facsimile of the commercial society of Bir- 
mingham or Brighton. But it is a part of the 
Puritan in Bernard Shaw a part of the taut 
and high-strung quality of his mind, that he 
will never admit of any of his jokes that it 
was only a joke. When he has been most 
witty he will passionately deny his own wit; 
he will say something which Voltaire might 
envy and then declare that he has got it all out 
of a Blue book. And in connection with this 
eccentric type of self-denial, we may notice 
this mere detail about the Ancient Briton. 
Someone faintly hinted that a blue Briton 
when first found by Caesar might not be quite 
like Mr. Broadbent; at the touch Shaw 
poured forth a torrent of theory, explain- 
ing that climate was the only thing that 

159 



George Bernard Shaw 



affected nationality; and that whatever races 
came into the English or Irish climate would 
become like the English or Irish. Now the 
modern theory of race is certainly a piece of 
stupid materialism; it is an attempt to explain 
the things we are sure of, France, Scotland, 
Rome, Japan, by means of the things we are 
not sure of at all, prehistoric conjectures, 
Celts, Mongols, and Iberians. Of course 
there is a reality in race; but there is no 
reality in the theories of race offered by some 
ethnological professors. Blood, perhaps, is 
thicker than water; but brains are sometimes 
thicker than anything. But if there is one 
hing yet more thick and obscure and senseless 
than this theory of the omnipotence of race 
it is, I think, that to which Shaw has fled for 
refuge from it; this doctrine of the omnip- 
otence of climate. Climate again is something; 
but if climate were everything, Anglo-Indians 
would grow more and more to look like 
Hindoos, vv'hich is far from being the case. 
Something in the evil spirit of our time forces 
people always to pretend to have found some 
material and mechanical explanation. Bernard 
Shaw has filled all his last days with affirma- 
tions about the divinity of the non-mechanical 
part of man, the sacred quality in creation and 
1 60 



Tlie Dramatist 



choice. Yet it never seems to have occurred 
to him that the true key to national differentia- 
tions is the key of the will and not of the 
environment. It never crosses the modern 
mind to fancy that perhaps a people is chiefly 
influenced by how that people has chosen to 
hehave. If I have to choose between race 
and weather I prefer race; I would rather be 
imprisoned and compelled by ancestors who 
were once alive than by mud and mists which 
never were. But I do not propose to be 
controlled by either; to me my national his- 
tory is a chain of multitudinous choices. It is 
neither blood nor rain that has made England, 
but hope, the thing that all those dead men 
have desired. France was not France because 
she was made to be by the skulls of the Celts 
or by the sun of Gaul. France was France 
because she chose. 

I have stepped on one side from the imme- 
diate subject because this is as good an instance 
as any we are likely to come across of a cer- 
tain almost extraneous fault which does deface 
the work of Bernard Shav/. It is a fault only 
to be mentioned when we have made the 
solidity ot the merits quite clear. To say 
that Shaw is merely making game of people is 
demonstrablv ridiculous; at least a fairly sys- 
L i6i 



George Bernard Shaw 



tematic philosophy can be traced thiougk all 
his jokes, and one would not insist on such a 
unity in all the songs of Mr. Dan Leno. I 
have already pointed out that the genius of 
Shaw is really too harsh and earnest rather 
than too merry and irresponsible. I shall 
have occasion to point out later that Shaw is, 
in one very serious sense, the very opposite of 
paradoxical. In any case if any real student 
of Shaw says that Shaw is only making a fool 
of him, we can only say that of that student it 
is very superfluous for anyone to make a fool. 
But though the dramatist's jests are always 
serious and generally obvious, he is really 
affected from time to time by a certam spirit 
of which that chmate theory is a case — a spuit 
that can only be called one of senseless in- 
genuity. I suppose it is a sort of nemesis ol 
wit; the skidding of a wheel in the height of 
its speed. Perhaps it is connected with the 
nomadic nature of his mind. That lack of 
roots, this remoteness from ancient mstmcts 
and traditions is responsible for a certam bleak 
and heartless extravagance of statement on 
certain subjects which makes the author really 
unconvincing as well as exaggerative; satires 
that are saugrenu, jokes that are rather silly 
than wild, statements which even considered 

162 



The Dramatwt 



liS lies have no symbolic relation to truth. 
They are exaggerations of something that does 
not exist. For instance, if a man called 
Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse 
for drunkenness and gluttony that would be 
false, but it would have a fact hidden in it 
somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says 
that Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept 
up by poulterers and wine merchants from 
strictly business motives, then he says some- 
thing which is not so much false as startlingly 
and arrestingly foolish. He might as well say 
that the two sexes were invented by jewellers 
who wanted to sell wedding rings. Or again, 
take the case of nationality and the unit ot 
patriotism. If a man said that all boundaries 
between clans, kingdoms, or empires were 
nonsensical or non-existent, that would be a 
fallacy, but a consistent and philosophical 
fallacy. But when Mr. Bernard Shaw says 
that England matters so little that the British 
Empire might very well give up these islands 
to Germany, he has not only got hold of the 
sow by the wrong ear but the wrong sow by 
the wrong ear; a mythical sow, a sow that is 
not there at all. If Britain is unreal, the 
British Empire must be a thousand times 
more unreal. It is as if one said, "I do not 

163 



George Bernard Shaiv 



believe that Michael Scott ever had any exist- 
ence; but I am convinced, in spite of the 
absurd legend, that he had a shadow." 

As has been said already, there must be 
some truth in every popular impression. 
And the impression that Shaw, the most 
savagely serious man of his time, is a mere 
music-hall artist must have reference to 
such rare outbreaks as these. As a rule his 
speeches are full, not only of substance, but of 
substances, materials like pork, mahogany, 
lead, and leather. There is no man whose 
arguments cover a more Napoleonic map of 
detail. It is true that he jokes; but wherever 
he is he has topical jokes, one might almost 
say family ]okes. If he talks to tailors he can 
allude to the last absurdity about buttons. If 
he talks to the soldiers he can see the exquisite 
and exact humour of the last gun-carriage. 
But when all his powerful practicality is 
allowed, there does run through him this 
erratic levity, an explosion of meptitude. It 
is a queer quality in literature. It is a sort of 
cold extravagance; and it has made him all his 
enemies. 



164 



The Philosopher 



I SHOULD suppose that Ccesar and CAeo- 
pa:ra marks about the turning tide of 
Bernard Shaw's fortune and fame. Up 
to this time he had known glory, but 
never success. He had been wondered at as 
something briUiant and barren, Hke a meteor; 
but no one would accept him as a sun, for the 
test of a sun is that it can make something grow. 
Practically speaking the two qualities of a 
modern drama are, that it should play and that 
It should pay. It had been proved over and 
over again in weighty dramatic criticisms, in 
careful readers' reports, that the plays of Shaw- 
could never play or pay; that the public did 
not want wit and the wars of intellect. And 
|ust about the time that this had been finally 
proved, the plays of Bernard Shaw promised to 
play like Charley s Aunt and to pay like Colman's 
Mustard. It is a fact in which we can all re- 
joice, not only because it redeems the reputation 
of Bernard Shaw, but because it redeems the 
character of the English people. All that is 
bravest in human nature, open challenge and 
unexpected wit and angry conviction, are not 
i6? 



George Bernard Shaiv 



so very unpopular as the publishers and mana- 
gers in their motor-cars have been in the habit of 
telling us. But exactly because we have come to 
a turning point in the man's career I propose to 
interrupt the mere catalogue of his plays and 
to treat his latest series rather as the proclama- 
tions of an acknowledged prophet. For the 
last plays, especially Man and Supennan, are 
such that his whole position must be re-stated 
before attacking them seriously. 

For two reasons I have called this concluding 
series of plays not again by the name of "The 
Dramatist," but by the general name of ''The 
Philosopher." The first reason is that given 
above, that we have come to the time of his 
triumph and may therefore treat him as having 
gained complete possession of a pulpit of his 
own. But there is a second reason: that it 
was just about this time that he began to 
create not only a pulpit of his own, but a 
church and creed of his own. It is a very 
vast and universal religion; and it is not his 
fault that he is the only member of it. The 
plainer way of putting it is this: that here, 
in the hour of his earthly victoiy, there dies 
in him the old mere denier, the mere dyna- 
miter of criticism. In the warmth ot popu- 
larity he begins to wish to put his faith 
1 66 



The Philosopher 



posinvel}"; to offer some solid key to all 
creation. Perhaps the irony in the situation 
IS this: that all the crowds are acclaiming him 
as the blasting and hypercritical buffoon, while 
he himself is seriously rallying his synthetic 
power, and with a grave face telling himself 
that it is time he had a faith to preach. His 
final success as a sort of charlatan coincides 
with his first grand failures as a theologian. 

For this reason I have deliberately called 
a halt in his dramatic career, in order to con- 
sider these two essential points: What did 
the mass of Englishmen, who had now learnt 
to admire him, imagine his point of view to 
be .^ and second. What did he imagine it to be .^ 
or, if the phrase be premature. What did he 
imagine it was going to be .^ In his latest 
work, especially in Alan and Superman, Shaw 
has become a complete and colossal mystic. 
That mysticism does grow quite rationally out 
of his older arguments; but very few people 
ever troubled to trace the connection. In 
order to do so it is necessary to say what was, 
at the time of his first success, the public im- 
press on of Shaw's philosophy. 

Now it is an irritating and pathetic thing 
that the three most popular phrases about 
Shaw are false. Modern criticism, like all 
167 



George Bernard Shaw 



weak things, is overloaded with words. In a 
healthy condition of language a man finds it 
very difficult to say the right thing, but at last 
says it. In this empire of journalese a man 
finds it so very easy to say the wrong thing 
that he never thinks of saying anything else. 
False or meaningless phrases lie so ready to 
his hand that it is easier to use them than not 
to use them. These wrong terms picked up 
through idleness are retained through habit, 
and so the man has begun to think wrong 
almost before he has begun to think at all. 
Such lumbering logomachy is always injurious 
and oppressive to men of spirit, imagination 
or intellectual honour, and it has dealt very 
recklessly and wrongly with Bernard Shaw. 
He has contrived to get about three news- 
paper phrases tied to his tail; and those news- 
paper phrases are all and separately wrong. 
The three superstitions about him, it will be 
conceded, are generally these: first that he 
desires "problem plays," second that he is 
"paradoxical," and third that in his dramas as 
elsewhere he is specially "a Socialist." And 
the interesting thing is that when we come to 
his philosophy, all these three phrases are quite 
peculiarly inapplicable. 

1 68 



The Philosopher 



lo take the pia) s first, there is a general 
disposition to describe that type of intimate 
or defiant drama which he approves as "the 
problem play." Now the serious modern plav 
is, as a rule, the \ery reverse of a problem 
play; for there can be no problem unless both 
points of view are equally and urgently pre- 
sented. Hamlet really is a problem play 
because at the end of it one is really m doubt 
as to whether upon the author's showing 
Hamlet is something more than a man or 
something less. Henry IV and Henry V are 
really problem plays; in this sense, that the 
reader or spectator is really doubtful whether 
the high but harsh efficiency, valour, and 
ambition of Henry V are an improvement 
on his old blackguard camaraderie; and 
whether he was not a better man when he was 
a thief. This hearty and healthy doubt is 
very common in Shakespeare; I mean a doubt 
that exists in the writer as well as in the 
reader. But Bernard Shaw is far too much of 
a Puritan to tolerate such doubts about points 
which he counts essential. There is no sort of 
doubt that the young lady in Arms and the Man 
is improved by losing her ideals. There is no 
sort of doubt that Captain Brassbound is im- 
proved by giving up the object of his life. 
169 



George Bernard Shaw 



But a better case can be found in something 
that both dramatists have been concerned with; 
Shaw wrote Ccssar and Cleopatra; Shakespeare 
wrote Antony and Cleopatra and also Julius 
CiBsar. And exactly what annoys Bernard 
Shaw about Shakespeare's version is this: 
that Shakespeare has an open mind or, in 
other words, that Shakespeare has really writ- 
ten a problem play. Shakespeare sees quite as 
clearly as Shaw that Brutus is unpractical and 
ineffectual; but he also sees, what is quite as 
plain and practical a fact, that these ineffectual 
men do capture the hearts and influence the 
policies of mankind. Shaw would have noth- 
ing said in favour of Brutus; because Brutus 
is on the wrong side in politics. Of the 
actual problem of public and private morality, 
as it was presented to Brutus, he takes actually 
no notice at all. He can write the most ener- 
getic and outspoken of propaganda plays; but 
he cannot rise to a problem play. He cannot 
really divide his mind and let the two parts 
speak independently to each other. He has 
never, so to speak, actually split his head in 
two; though I daresay there are many other 
people who are willing to do it for him. 

Sometimes, especially in his later plays, he 
allows his clear conviction to spoil even his 

170 



The Phi osopher 



admirable dialogue, making one side entirely 
weak, as in an Evangelical tract. I do not 
know whether in Major Barbara the young 
Greek professor was supposed to be a fool. 
As popular tradition (which I trust more 
than anything else) declared that he is drawn 
from a real Professor of my acquaintance, 
who is anything but a fool, I should imagine 
not. But in that case I am all the more 
mystified by the incredibly weak fight which 
he makes in the play in answer to the 
elephantine sophistries of Undershaft. It is 
really a disgraceful case, and almost the only 
case in Shaw of there being no fair fight 
between the two sides. For instance, the 
Professor mentions pity. Mr. Undershaft 
says with melodramatic scorn, "Pity! the 
scavenger of the Universe!" Now if any 
gentleman had said this to me, I should have 
replied, "If I permit you to escape from the 
point by means of metaphors, will you tell 
me whether you disapprove of scavengers?" 
Instead of this obvious retort, the miserable 
Greek professor only says, "Well then, love," 
to which Undershaft replies with unnecessary 
violence that he won't have the Greek pro- 
fessor's love, to which the obvious answer of 
course would be, "How the deuce can you 



George Bernard Shatr 



prevent my loving you if I choose to do so?" 
Instead of this, as far as I remember, that 
abject Hellenist says nothing at all. I only 
mention this unfair dialogue, because it marks, 
I think, the recent hardening, for good or 
evil, of Shaw out of a dramatist into a mere 
philosopher, and whoever hardens into a phi- 
losopher may be hardening into a fanatic. 

And just as there is nothing really prob- 
lematic in Shaw's mind, so there is nothing 
really paradoxical. The meaning of the word 
paradoxical may indeed be made the subject 
of argument. In Greek, of course, it sim- 
ply means something which is against the 
received opinion; in that sense a missionary 
remonstrating with South Sea cannibals is 
paradoxical. But in the much more im- 
portant world, where words are used and 
altered in the using, paradox does not mean 
merely this: it means at least something of 
which the antinomy or apparent inconsistency 
is sufficiently plain in the words used, and 
most commonly of all it means an idea ex- 
pressed in a form which is verbally contradic- 
tory. Thus, for instance, the great saying, 
"He that shall lose his life, the same shall 
save it," is an example of what modern people 
mean by a paradox. If anv learned person 

172 



The Philosopher 



should read this book (which seems im- 
measurably improbable) he can content him- 
self with putting it this w^ay, that the moderns 
mistakenly say paradox when they should say 
oxymoron. Ultimately, in any case, it may 
be agreed that we commonly mean by a 
paradox some kind of collision between what 
is seemingly and what is really true. 

Now if by paradox we mean truth inherent 
in a contradiction, as in the saying of Christ 
that I have quoted, it is a very curious fact 
that Bernard Shaw is almost entirely without 
paradox. Moreover, he cannot even under- 
stand a paradox. And more than this, paradox 
is about the only thing in the world that he 
does not understand. All his splendid vistas 
and startling suggestions arise from carrymg 
some one clear principle further than it has 
yet been carried. His madness is all con- 
sistency, not inconsistency. As the point can 
hardly be made clear without examples, let us 
take one example, the subject of education. 
Shaw has been all his life preaching to grown- 
up people the profound truth that liberty and 
responsibility go together; that the reason 
why freedom is so often easily withheld, is 
simply that it is a terrible nuisance. This is 
true, though not the whole truth, of citizens; 

173 



George Bernard Shaw 



and so when Shaw comes to children he can 
only apply to them the same principle that he 
has already applied to citizens. He begins to 
play with the Herbert Spencer idea of teaching 
children by experience; perhaps the most 
fatuously silly idea that was ever gravely put 
down in print. On that there is no need to 
dwell; one has only to ask how the experi- 
mental method is to be applied to a precipice; 
and the theory no longer exists. But Shaw 
effected a further development, if possible 
more fantastic. He said that one should never 
tell a child anything without letting him hear 
the opposite opinion. That is to say, when 
you tell Tommy not to hit his sick sister on 
the teembi, you must make sure of the 
presence of some Nietzscheite professor, who 
will explain to him that such a course might 
possibly serve to eliminate the unfit. When 
you are in the act of telling Susap not to 
drink out of the bottle labelled "poison," 
you must telegraph for a Christian Scientist, 
who will be ready to maintain that without 
her own consent it cannot do her any harm. 
What would happen to a child brought up on 
Shaw's principle I cannot conceive; I should 
think he would commit suicide in his bath. 
But that is not here the question. The point 

174 



The Philosopher 



is that this proposition seems quite sufficiently 
wild and startling to ensure that its author, if 
he escapes Hanwell, would reach the front rank 
of journalists, demagogues, or public enter- 
tainers. It is a perfect paradox, if a paradox 
only means something that makes one jump. 
But it is not a paradox at all in the sense of 
a contradiction. It is not a contradiction, but 
an enormous and outrageous consistency, the 
one principle of free thought carried to a 
point to which no other sane man would con- 
sent to carry it. Exactly what Shaw does not 
understand is the paradox; the unavoidable 
paradox of childhood. Although this child 
is much better than I, yet I must teach it. 
Although this being has much purer passions 
than I, yet I must control it. Although 
Tommy is quite right to rush towards a 
precipice, yet he must be stood in the corner 
for doing it. This contradiction is the only 
possible condition of having to do with chil- 
dren at all; anyone who talks about a child 
without feeling this paradox might just as 
well be talking about a merman. He has 
never even seen the animal. But this paradox 
Shaw in his intellectual simplicity cannot see; 
he cannot see it because it is a paradox. His 
only intellectual excitement is to carry one 

175 



Gcurc/c Bernard ^Jiaw 



idea further and further across the world. It 
never occurs to him that it might meet another 
idea, and Hke the three winds in Martin 
Chuzzlewit, they might make a night of it. 
His only paradox is to pull out one thread or 
cord of truth longer and longer into waste 
and fantastic places. He does not allow for 
that deeper sort of paradox by which two 
opposite cords of truth become entangled in 
an inextricable knot. Still less can he be 
made to realise that it is often this knot which 
ties safely together the. whole bundle of human 
life. 

This blindness to paradox everywhere per- 
plexes his outlook. He cannot understand 
marriage because he will not understand the 
paradox of marriage; that the woman is all 
the more the house for not bemg the head of 
it. He cannot understand patriotism, because 
he will not understand the paradox qi' patriot- 
ism; that one is all the more human for not 
merely loving humanity. He does not under- 
stand Christianity because he will not under- 
stand the paradox of Christianity; that we can 
only really understand all myths when we 
know that one of them is true. I do not 
under-rate him for this anti-paradoxical temper; 
I concede that much of his finest and keenest 



Tlw Philosopher 



work in the way of intellectual purification 
would have been difficult or impossible without 
it. But I say that here lies the limitation of that 
lucid and compelling mind; he cannot quite 
understand life, because he will not accept its 
contradictions. 

Nor is it by any means descriptive of Shaw 
to call him a Socialist; in so far as that word 
can be extended to cover an ethical attitude. 
He is the least social of all Socialists; and I 
pity the Socialist state that tries to manage 
him. This anarchism of his is not a question 
of thinking for himself; every decent man 
thinks for himself; it would be highly im- 
modest to think for anybody else. Nor is it 
any instinctive licence or egoism; as I have 
said before, he is a man of peculiarly acute 
public conscience. The unmanageable part of 
him, the fact that he cannot be conceived as 
part of a crowd or as really and invisibly help- 
ing a movement, has reference to another 
thing in him, or rather to another thing not 
in him. 

The great defect of that fine inteUigence is 
a failure to grasp and enjoy the things com- 
monly called convention and tradition; which 
are foods upon which all human creatures 
must feed frequently if they are to live. 

177 



George Bernard Shair 



Very few modern people of course have any 
idea of wha.t they are. "Convention" is 
very nearly the same word as "democracy." 
It has again and again in history been used 
as an alternative word to Parliament. So far 
from suggesting anything stale or sober, the 
word convention rather conveys a hubbub; 
it is the coming together of men; every mob 
is a convention. In its secondary sense it 
means the common soul of such a crowd, its 
instinctive anger at the traitor or its instinc- 
tive salutation of the flag. Conventions may 
be cruel, they may be unsuitable, they may 
even be grossly superstitious or obscene; but 
there is one thing that they never are. Con- 
ventions are never dead. They are always 
full of accumulated emotions, the piled-up 
and passionate experiences of many genera- 
tions asserting what they could not explain. 
7o be inside any true convention, as the 
Chinese respect for parents or the European 
respect for children, is to be surrounded by 
something which whatever else it is is not 
leaden, lifeless or automatic, something which 
is taut and tingling with vitality at a hundred 
points, which is sensitive almost to madness 
and which is so much alive that it can kill. 
Now Bernard Shaw has always made this one 
178 



The Philosopher 



immense mistake (arising out of that bad 
progressive education of his), the mistake 
of treating convention as a dead thing; treat- 
ing it as if it were a mere physical environ- 
ment like the pavement or the ram. Where- 
as it is a result of will; a rain of blessings 
and a pavement of good intentions. Let it 
be remembered that I am not discussing in 
what degree one should allow for tradition; 
I am saving that men like Shaw do not allow 
for it at all. If Shaw had found in early life 
that he was contradicted by Bradshaiv s Rail- 
u'oy Guide or even by the Encyclopcedia Brit- 
annica, he would have felt at least that he 
might be wrong. But if he had found him- 
self contradicted by his father and mother, he 
would have thought it all the more probable 
that he was right. If the issue of the last 
evening paper contradicted him he might be 
troubled to investigate or explain. That the 
human tradition of two thousand years con- 
tradicted him did not trouble him for an 
instant. That Marx was not with him was 
important. That Man was not with him was 
an irrelevant prehistoric joke. People have 
talked far too much about the paradoxes of 
Bernard Shaw. Perhaps his only pure para- 
dox is this almost unconscious one; that he 
179 



George Bernard Shaw 



has tended to think that because something 
has satisfied generations of men it must be 
untrue. 

Shaw is wrong about nearly all the things 
one learns early in life and while one is still 
simple. Most human beings start with certain 
facts of psychology to which the rest of life 
must be somewhat related. For instance, 
every man falls in love; and no man falls into 
free love. When he falls into that he calls it 
lust, and is always ashamed of it even when he 
boasts of it. That there is some connection 
between a love and a vow nearly every human 
being knows before he is eighteen. That 
there is a solid and instinctive connection 
between the idea of sexual ecstasy and the 
idea of some sort of almost suicidal con- 
stancy, this I say is simply the first fact in 
one's own psychology; boys and girls know 
it almost before they know their own language. 
How far it can be trusted, how can it best be 
dealt with, all that is another matter. But 
lo\ers lust after constancy moie than after 
happiness; if you are in any sense pre- 
pared to give them what they ask, then what 
they ask, beyond all question, is an oath of 
final fidelity. Lovers may be lunatics; lovers 
may be children; lovers may be unfit for 
1 80 



The PJiUosopher 



citizenship and outside human argument; 
you can take up that position if you will. 
But lovers do not only desire love; they 
desire marriage. The root of legal monogam\' 
does not lie (as Shaw and his friends are for 
ever drearily asserting) in the fact that the 
man is a mere tyrant and the woman a mere 
slave. It lies in the fact that // their love 
for each other is the noblest and freest love 
conceivable, it can only find its heroic ex- 
pression in both becoming slaves. I only 
mention this matter here as a matter which 
most of us do not need to be taught; for 
it was the first lesson of life. In after years 
we may make up what code or compromise 
about sex we like; but we all know that con- 
stancy, jealousy, and the personal pledge are 
natural and inevitable in sex; we do not feel 
any surprise when we see them either m a 
murder or in a valentine. We may or may not 
see wisdom in early marriages; but we know 
quite well that wherever the thing is genuine 
at all, early loves will mean early marriages. 
But Shaw had not learnt about this tragedy 
of the sexes, what the rustic ballads of any 
country on earth would have taught him. 
He had not learnt, what universal common 
sense has put into all the folk-lore of the 



George Bernard Shaiv 



earth, that love cannot be thought of clearly 
for an instant except as monogamous. The 
old English ballads never sing the praises of 
"lovers." They always sing the praises of 
''true lovers," and that is the final philosophy 
of the question. 

The same is true of Mr. Shaw's refusal to 
understand the love of the land either in the 
form of patriotism or of private ownership. 
It is the attitude of an Irishman cut off from 
the soil of Ireland, retaining the audacity and 
even cynicism of the national type, but no 
longer fed from the roots with its pathos or 
its experience. 

This broader and more brotherly rendering 
of convention must be applied particularly to 
the conventions of the drama; since that is 
necessarily the most democratic of ah the arts. 
And it will be found generally that most of 
the theatrical conventions rest on a re^l artistic 
basis. The Greek Unities, for instance, were 
not proper objects of the meticulous and 
trivial miitation of Seneca or Gabriel Harvey. 
But still less were they the right objects for 
the equally trivial and far more vulgar im- 
patience of men like Macaulay. That a tale 
should, if possible, be told of one place or one 
day or a manageable number of characters is an 
182 



The Philosopher 



ideal plainly rooted in an aesthetic instinct. 
But if this be so with the classical drama, it is 
yet more certainly so with romantic drama, 
against the somewhat decayed dignity of which 
Bernard Shaw was largely in rebellion. There 
was one point in particular upon which the 
Ibsenites claimed to have reformed the 
romantic convention which is worthy of special 
allusion. 

Shaw and all the other Ibsenites were fond 
of insisting that a defect in the romantic 
drama was its tendency to end with wedding- 
bells. Against this they set the modern 
drama of middle-age, the drama which de- 
scribed marriage itself instead of its poetic 
preliminaries. Now if Bernard Shaw had 
been more patient with popular tradition, 
more prone to think that there might be 
some sense in its survival, he might have 
seen this particular problem much more 
clearly. The old playwrights have left us 
plenty of plays of marriage and middle-age. 
Othello IS as much about what follows the 
wedding-bells as The DolFs House. Macbeth 
is about a middle-aged couple as much as 
Little Evolf. But if we ask ourselves what 
is the real difference, we shall, I think, find 
that it can fairly be stated thus. The old 

183 



George Bernard Shaw 



tragedies of marriage, though not love stories, 
are like love stories in this, that they work 
up to some act or stroke which is irrevocable 
as marriage is irrevocable; to the fact of death 
or of adultery. 

Now the reason vv^hy our fathers did not 
make marriage, in the middle-aged and static 
sense, the subject of their plays was a very 
simple one; it was that a play is a very bad 
place for discussing that topic. You cannot 
easily make a good drama out of the success 
or failure of a marriage, just as you could not 
make a good drama out of the growth of an 
oak tree or the decay of an empire. As 
Polonius very reasonably observed, it is too 
long. A happy love-affair will make a drama 
simply because it is dramatic; it depends on 
an ultimate yes or no. But a happy marriage 
is not dramatic; perhaps it would be less 
happy if it were. The essence of j& romantic 
heroine is that she asks herself an intense 
question; but the essence of a sensible wife 
is that she is much too sensible to ask herself 
any questions at all. All the things that make 
monogamy a success are in their nature un- 
dramatic things, the silent growth of an 
mstinctive confidence, the common wounds 
and victories, the accumulation of customs, 

184 



The PJiiloso flier 



the rich maturing of old jokes. Sane mar- 
riage is an untheatrical thing; it is therefore 
not surprising that most modern dramatists 
have devoted themselves to insane marriao-e. 

To summarise; before touching the philos- 
ophy which Shaw has ultimately adopted, we 
must quit the notion that we know it alread\- 
and that it is hit off in such journalistic terms 
as these three. Shaw does not wish to multiply 
problem plays or even problems. He has such 
scepticism as is the misfortune of his age; bur 
he has this dignified and courageous quality, 
that he does not come to ask questions but to 
answer them. He is not a paradox-monger; 
he is a wild logician, far too simple even to be 
called a sophist. He understands everything 
in life except its paradoxes, especially that ulti- 
mate paradox that the very things that we can- 
not comprehend are the things that we have to 
take for g,ranted. Lastly, he is not especially 
social or coUectivist. On the contrary, he rather 
dislikes men in the mass, though he can appre- 
ciate them individually. He has no respect 
for collective humanity in its two great forms; 
either in that momentary form which we call 
a mob, or in that enduring form which we call 
a cx)nvention. 

185 



George Bernard Shaw 



The general cosmic theory which can so far 
be traced through the earlier essays and plays 
of Bernard Shaw may be expressed in the 
unage of Schopenhauer standing on his head. 
I cheerfully concede that Schopenhauer looks 
much nicer in that posture than in his original 
one, but I can hardly suppose that he feels 
more comfortable. The substance of the change 
is this. Roughly speaking, Schopenhauer main- 
tained that life is unreasonable. The intellect, 
if it cou'd be impartial, would tell us to cease; 
but a blind partiality, an instinct quite dis- 
tinct from thought, drives us on to take 
desperate chances in an essentially bankrupt 
lottery. Shaw seems to accept this dmgy 
estimate of the rational outlook, but adds a 
somewhat arresting comment. Schopenhauer 
had said, "Life is unreasonable; so much the 
worse for all living things." Shaw said, ''Life 
is unreasonable; so much the worse for reason." 
Life is the higher call, life we must follow. It 
may be that there is some undetected fallacy in 
reason itself. Perhaps the whole man cannot 
get inside his own head any more than he can 
]ump down his own throat. But there is about 
the need to live, to suffer, and to create that 
imperative quahvt which can truly be called 
supernatural, of whose voice it can mdeed be 
186 



The P/ii'o.soiJicr 



said that it speaks with authority, and not as 
the scribes. 

This is the first and finest item of the original 
Bernard Shaw creed: that if reason says that 
hfe is irrational, Hfe must be content to reph' 
tliat reason is Ufeless; Hfe is the primary 
thing, and if reason impedes it, then reason 
must be troddne down into the mire amid the 
most abject superstitions. In the ordinary 
sense it would be specially absurd to suggest 
that Shaw desires man to be a mere animal. 
For that is always associated with lust or in- 
continence; and Shaw's ideals are strict, 
hygienic, and even, one might say, old-maidish. 
But there is a mystical sense in which one 
may say literally that Shaw desires man to 
be an animal. That is, he desires him to 
cling first and last to life, to the spirit of 
animation, to the thing which is common to 
him and the birds and plants. Man should 
have the blind faith of a beast: he should be 
as mystically immutable as a cow, and as deaf 
to sophistries as a fish. Shaw does not wish 
him to be a philosopher or an artist; he does 
not even wish him to be a man, so much as 
he wishes him to be, in this holy sense, an 
animal. He must follow the flag of life as 

187 



George Bernard Ska to 



fiercely from conviction as all other creatures 
follow it from instinct. 

But this Shavian worship of life is by no 
means lively. It has nothing in common either 
with the braver or the baser forms of what we 
commonly call optimism. It has none of the 
omnivorous exultation of Walt Whitman or 
the fiery pantheism of Shelley. Bernard Shaw 
wishes to show himself not so much as an 
optimist, but rather as a sort of faithful and 
contented pessimist. This contradiction is the 
key to nearly all his early and more obvious 
contradictions and to many which remain to the 
end. Whitman and many modern idealists 
have talked of taking even duty as a pleasure; 
it seems to me that Shaw takes even pleasure 
as a duty. In a queer way he seems to see 
existence as an illusion and yet as an obligation. 
To every man and woman, bird, beast, and 
flower, life is a love-call to be eagerly followed. 
To Bernard Shaw it is merely a military 
bugle to be obeyed. In short, he fails to feel 
that the command of Nature (if one must use 
the anthropomorphic fable of Nature instead of 
the philosophic term God) can be enjoyed as 
well as obeyed. He paints life at its darkest 
and then tells the babe unborn to take the leap 
in the dark. That is heroic; and to my 
i88 



The Ph i I o soph e r 



instinct at least Schopenhauer looks like a 
pigmy beside his pupil. But it is the hero- 
ism of a morbid and almost asphyxiated age. 
It is awful to think that this world which so 
many poets have praised has even for a time 
been depicted as a man-trap into which we 
may just have the manhood to ]ump. Think 
of all those ages through which men have 
talked of having the courage to die. And 
then remember that we have actually fallen 
to ta'king about having the courage to 
live. 

It is exactly this oddity or dilemma which 
may be said to culminate in the crowning work 
of his later and more constructive period, the 
work in which he certainly attempted, whether 
with success or not, to state his ultimate and 
cosmic vision; I mean the play called Man 
and Superman. In approaching this play we 
must keep well in mind the distinction recently 
drawn: that Shaw follows the banner of life, 
but austerely, not joyously. For him nature 
has authority, but hardly charm. But before 
we approach it it is necessary to deal with three 
things that lead up to it. First it is necessarv^ 
to speak of what remained of his old critical 
and reaHstic method; and then it is necessary 
to speak of the two important influences which 
189 



George Bernard Shaw 



led up to his last and most important change of 
outlook. 

First, since all our spiritual epochs overlap, 
and a man is often doing the old work while 
he is thinking of the new, we may deal first 
with what may be fairly called his last two 
plays of pure worldly criticism. These are 
Major Barbara and 'John Bull's Other Island. 
Major Barbara indeed contains a strong 
religious element; but, when all is said, the 
whole point of the play is that the religious 
element is defeated. Moreover, the actual 
expressions of religion in the play are some- 
what unsatisfactory as expressions of religion — 
or even of reason. I must frankly say that 
Bernard Shaw always seems to me to use the 
word God not only without any idea of what 
it means, but without one moment's thought 
about what it could possibly mean. He said 
to some atheist, "Never believe in a JGod that 
you cannot improve on." The atheist (being 
a sound theologian) naturally replied that one 
should not believe in a God whom one could 
improve on; as that would show that he was 
not God. In the same style in Major Bar- 
bara the heroine ends by suggesting that she 
will serve God without personal hope, so that 
she mav owe nothing to God and He owe 



The Philosopher 



everything to her. It does not seem to strike 
her that if God owes everything to her He is 
not God. These things affect me merely as 
tedious perversions of a phrase. It is as if you 
said, "I will never have a father unless I have 
begotten him." 

But the real sting and substance of Major 
Barbara is much more practical and to the 
point. It expresses not the new spirituality 
but the old materialism of Bernard Shaw. 
Almost every one of Shaw's plays is an ex- 
panded epigram. But the epigram is not 
expanded (as with most people) into a hundred 
commonplaces. Rather the epigram is ex- 
panded into a hundred other epigrams; the 
work is at least as brilliant in detail as it is in 
design. But it is generally possible to discover 
the original and pivotal epigram which is the 
centre and purpose of the play. It is generally 
|:)ossible, even amid that blinding jewellery of 
a million jokes, to discover the grave, solemn 
and sacred joke for which the play itself was 
written. 

7 he ultimate epigram of Major Barbara 
can be put thus. People say that poverty is 
no crime; Shaws says that poverty is a crime; 
that it is a crime to endure it, a crime to be 
content with it, that it is the mother of all 
191 



George Bernard Shaw 



crimes of brutality, corruption, and fear. It 
a man says to Shaw that he is born of poor 
but honest parents, Shaw tells him that the 
very word "but" shows that his parents were 
probably dishonest. In short, he maintains 
here what he had maintained elsewhere: that 
what the people at this moment require is not 
more patriotism or more art or more religion 
or more morality or more sociology, but simply 
more money. The evil is not ignorance or 
decadence or sin or pessimism; the evil is 
poverty. The point of this particular drama 
is that even the noblest enthusiasm of the girl 
who becomes a Salvation Army officer fails 
under the brute money power of her father 
who is a modern capitalist. When I have said 
this it will be clear why this play, line and full 
of bitter sincerity as it is, must in a manner 
be cleared out of the way before we come to 
talk of Shaw's final and serious fakh. For 
his serious faith is in the sanctity of human 
will, in the divine capacity for creation and 
choice rising higher than environment and 
doom; and so far as that goes, Ma or Bar- 
bara is not only apart from his faith but 
ao;ainst his faith. Major Barbara is an ac- 
count of environment victorious over heroic 
will. There are a thousand answers to the 

192 



Til c Pli ilosopher 



ethic in Major Barbara which I should be 
inclined to offer. I might point out that the 
rich do not so much buy honesty as curtains to 
cover dishonesty: that they do not so much buy 
health as cushions to comfort disease. And I 
might suggest that the doctrine that poverty 
degrades the poor is much more likely to be 
used as an argument for keeping them power- 
less than as an argument for making them 
rich. But there is no need to find such 
answers to the materialistic pessimism of 
Major Barbara. The best answer to it 
is in Shaw's own best and crowning philos- 
ophy, w^ith which we shall shortly be con- 
cerned. 

yohn Bull's Other Island represents a realism 
somewhat more tinged with the later trans- 
cendentalism of its author. In one sense, of 
course, it is a satire on the conventional 
Englishman, who is never so silly or senti- 
mental as when he sees silliness and sentiment 
in the Irishman. Broadbent, whose mind is 
all fog and his morals all gush, is firmly per- 
suaded that he is bringing reason and order 
among the Irish, whereas in truth they are all 
smiling at his illusions with the critical de- 
tachment of so many devils. There have been 
many plays depicting the absurd Paddy in a 

'93 



George Bernard Shaic 



ring of Anglo-Saxons; the first purpose oi 
this play is to depict the absurd Anglo-Saxon 
in a ring of ironical Paddies. But it has a 
second and more subtle purpose, which is 
very finely contrived. It is suggested that 
when all is said and done there is in this pre- 
posterous Englishman a certain creative power 
which comes from his simplicity and optimism, 
from his profound resolution rather to live 
life than to criticise it. I know no finer dia- 
logue of philosophical cross-purposes than that 
in which Broadbent boasts of his common- 
sense, and his subtler Irish friend mystifies 
him by telling him that he, Broadbent, has 
no common-sense, but only inspiration. The 
Irishman admits in Broadbent a certain un- 
conscious spiritual force even in h s very 
stupidity. Lord Rosebery coined the very 
clever phrase "a practical mystic." Shaw is 
here maintaining that all practical men are 
practical mystics. And he is really main- 
raining also that the most practical of all the 
practical mystics is the one who is a fool. 

There is something unexpected and fascinat- 
ing about this reversal of the usual argument 
touching enterprise and the business man; 
this theory that success is created not by in- 
telligence, but by a certain half-witted and yet 

194 



The Philosonher 



magical Instinct. For Bernard Shaw, appar- 
ently, the forests of factories and the moun- 
tains of money are not the creations of human 
wisdom or even of human cunning; they are 
rather manifestations of the sacred maxim 
which declares that God has chosen the foolish 
things of the earth to confound the wise. It 
is simplicity and even innocence that has made 
Manchester. As a philosophical fancy this is 
interesting or even suggestive; but it must be 
confessed that as a criticism of the relations 
of England to Ireland it is open to a strong 
historical objection. The one weak point in 
Johfi Bull's Other Island is that it turns on 
the fact that Broadbent succeeds in Ireland. 
But as a matter of fact Broadbent has not 
succeeded in Ireland. If getting what one 
wants is the test and fruit of this mysterious 
strength, then the Irish peasants are certainly 
much stronger than the English merchants; 
for in spite of all the efforts of the merchants, 
the land has remained a land of peasants. No 
glorification of the English practicality as if it 
were a universal thing can ever get over the 
fact that we have failed in dealing with the 
one white people in our power who were 
markedly unlike ourselves. And the kindness 
of Broadbent has failed just as much as his 

195 



George Bernard Shaw 



common-sense; because he was dealing with a 
people w^hose desire and ideal were different 
from his own. He did not share the Irish 
passion for small possession in land or for the 
more pathetic virtues of Christianity. In fact 
the kindness of Broadbent has failed for the 
same reason that the gigantic kindness of 
Shaw has failed. The roots are different; it 
is like tying the tops of two trees together. 
Briefly, the philosophy of John Bull's Other 
Island is quite effective and satisfactory 
except for this incurable fault: the fact that 
John Bull's other island is not John Bull's. 

This clearing off of his last critical plays 
we may classify as the first of the three facts 
which lead up to Man and Superman. The 
second of the three facts may be found, I 
think, in Shaw's discovery of Nietzche. This 
eloquent sophist has an influence upon Shaw 
and his school which it would require a separate 
book adequately to study. By descent Nietzche 
/. was__a- Pole, and probably a Polish noble; and 

to say that he was a Polish noble is to say that 
he was a frail, fastidious, and entirely useless 
anarchist. He had a wonderful poetic wit; 
and is one of the best rhetoricians of the 
modern world. He had a remarkable power 
of saying things that master the reason for a 
ig6 



The Philosooher 



moment by their gigantic unreasonableness; 
as, for instance, "Your life is intolerable with- 
out immortality; but why should not your 
lite be intolerable?" His whole work is shot 
through with the pangs and fevers of his 
physical life, which was one of extreme bad 
health; and in early middle age his brilliant 
brain broke down into impotence and dark- 
ness. All that was true in his teaching was 
this: that if a man looks fine on a horse it is 
so far irrelevant to tell him that he would be 
more economical on a donkey or more humane 
on a tricycle. In other words, the mere achieve- 
ment ot dignity, beauty, or triumph is strictly 
to be called a good thing. I do not know if 
Nietzsche ever used the illustration; but it 
seems to me that all that is creditable or sound in 
Nietzsche could be stated in the derivation of 
one word, the word "valour." Valour means 
valcur; it means a value; courage is itself a 
solid good; it is an ultimate virtue; valour 
is in itself valid. In so far as he maintained 
this Nietzsche was only taking part in that 
great Protestant game of see-saw which has 
been the amusement of northern Europe since 
the sixteenth century. Nietzsche imagined he 
was rebelling against ancient morality; as a 
matter of fact he was only rebelling against 
197 



George Bernard Shaw 



recent morality, against the half-baked impu- 
dence of the utilitarians and the materialists. 
He thought he was rebelling against Chris- 
tianity; curiously enough he was rebelling 
solely against the special enemies of Chris- 
tianity, against Herbert Spencer and Mr. 
Edward Clodd. Historic Christianity has 
always believed in the valour of St. Michael 
riding in front of the Church Militan; and in 
an ultimate and absolute pleasure, not indirect 
or utilitarian, the intoxication of the spirit, the 
wine of the blood of God. 

There are indeed doctrines of Nietzsche that 
are not Christian, but then, by an entertaining 
coincidence, they are also not true. His 
hatred of pity is not Christian, but that was 
not his doctrine but his disease. Invalids are 
often hard on invalids. And there is another 
doctrine of his that is not Christianity, and 
also (by the same laughable accident) not 
common-sense; and it is a most pathetic cir- 
cumstance that this was the one doctrine 
which caught the eye of Shaw and captured 
him. He was not influenced at all by the 
morbid attack on mercy. It would require 
more than ten thousand mad Polish pro- 
fessors to make Bernard Shaw anything but 
a generous and compassionate man. But it is 
198 



The Philosopher 



certainly a nuisance that the one Nietzsche 
doctrine which attracted him was not the one 
Nietzsche doctrine that is human and rectify- 
ing. Nietzsche might really have done some 
good if he had taught Bernard Shaw to draw 
the sword, to drink wine, or even to dance. 
But he only succeeded in putting into his 
head a new superstition, which bids fair to 
be the chief superstition of the dark ages 
which are possibly in front of us — I mean 
the superstition of what is called the Super- 
man. 

In one of his least convincing phrases, 
Nietzsche had said that just as the ape ulti- 
mately produced the man, so should we ulti- 
mately produce something higher than the 
man. The immediate answer, of course, is 
sufficiently obvious: the ape did not worry 
about the man, so why should we worry about 
the Superman ? If the Superman will come 
by natural selection, may we leave it to natural 
selection .^ If the Superman will come by 
human selection, what sort of Superman are 
we to select .? If he is simply to be more 
lust, more brave, or more merciful, then 
Zarathustra sinks into a Sunday-school 
teacher; the only way we can work for it is 
to be more just, more brave, and more merci- 
199 



George Bernard Shaw 



ful; sensible advice, but hardly startling. If 
he is to be anything else than this, why should 
we desire him, or what else are we to desire ? 
These questions have been many times asked 
of the Nietzscheites, and none of the Nietz- 
scheites have even attempted to answer them. 

The keen intellect of Bernard Shaw would, 
I think, certainly have seen through this fal- 
lacy and verbiage had it not been that another 
important event about this time came to the 
help of Nietzsche and estabHshed the Super- 
man on his pedestal. It is the third of the 
things which I have called stepping-stones to 
Man and Superynan, and it is very im- 
portant. It is nothing less than the break- 
down of one of the three intellectual supports 
upon which Bernard Shaw had reposed through 
all his confident career. At the beginning of 
this book I have described the three ultimate 
supports of Shaw as the Irishman, the Puritan, 
and the Progressive. They are the three legs 
of the tripod upon which the prophet sat to 
give the oracle; and one of them broke, just 
about this time suddenly, by a mere shaft of 
illumination, Bernard Shaw ceased to believe 
m progress altogether. 

It is generally implied that i was reading 
Plato that did it. That philosopher was very 

200 



The Philosopher 



well qualified to convey the first shock of the 
ancient civilisation to Shaw, who had always 
thought instinctively of civilisation as modern. 
7 his is not due merely to the daring splendour 
of the speculations and the vivid picture of 
Athenian life, it is due also to something 
analogous in the personalities of that par- 
ticular ancient Greek and this particular 
modern Irishman. Bernard Shaw has much 
affinity to Plato — in his instinctive elevation of 
temper, his courageous pursuit of ideas as far 
as they will go, his civx idealism; and also, it 
must be confessed, in his dislike of poets and 
a touch of delicate inhumanity. But whatever 
influence produced the change, the change had 
all the dramatic suddenness and completeness 
which belongs to the conversions of great 
men. It had been perpetually implied through 
all the earlier works not only that mankind is 
constantly improving, but that almost every- 
thing must be considered in the light of this 
fact. More than once he seemed to argue, in 
comparing the dramatists of the sixteenth 
with those of the nineteenth century, that 
the latter had a definite advantage merely 
because they were of the nineteenth century 
and not of the sixteenth. When accused of 
impertinence towards the grea:est of the 

201 



George Bernard Shaw 



Elizabethans, Bernard Shaw had said, 
"Shakespeare is a much taller man than I, 
but I stand on his shoulders" — an epigram 
which sums up this doctrine with character- 
istic neatness. But Shaw fell off Shakespeare's 
shoulders with a crash. This chronological 
theory that Shaw stood on Shakespeare's 
shoulders logically involved the supposition 
that Shakespeare stood on Plato's shoulders. 
And Bernard Shaw found Plato from his point 
of view so much more advanced than Shake- 
speare that he decided in desperation that all 
three were equal. 

Such failure as has partially attended the 
idea of human equality is very largely due to 
the fact that no party in the modern state has 
heartily believed in it. Tories and Radicals 
have both assumed that one set of men were in 
essentials superior to mankind. The only 
difference was that the Tory superiority was 
a superiority of place; while the Radical 
superiority is a superiority of time. The 
great objection to Shaw being on Shakespeare's 
shoulders is a consideration for the sensations 
and personal dignity of Shakespeare. It is a 
democratic objection to anyone being on any- 
one else's shoulders. Eternal human nature 
refuses to submit to a man who rules merely 

202 



The Fhi'osopher 



by right of birth. To rule by right of century 
is to rule by right of birth. Shaw found his 
nearest kinsman in remote Athens, his remotest 
enemies in the closest historical proximity; 
and he began to see the enormous average and 
the vast level of mankind. If progress swung 
constantly between such extremes it could not 
be progress at all. The paradox was sharp 
but undeniable; if life had such continual ups 
and downs, it was upon the whole flat. With 
characteristic sincerity and love of sensation he 
had no sooner seen this than he hastened to 
declare it. In the teeth of all his previous 
pronouncements he emphasised and re-em- 
phasised in print that man had not progressed 
at all; that ninety-nine hundredths of a man 
in a cave were the same as ninety-nine 
hundredths of a man in a suburban villa. 

It is characteristic of him to say that he 
rushed into print with a frank confession ot 
the failure of his old theory. But it is also 
characteristic of him that he rushed into print 
also with a new alternative theory, quite as 
definite, quite as confident, and, if one may 
put it so, quite as infaUible as the old one. 
Progress had never happened hitherto, because 
it had been sought solely through education. 
Education was rubbish. "Fancy," said he, 
203 



George Bernard Shaw 



"trying to produce a greyhound or a race- 
horse by education!" The man of the future 
must not be taught; he must be bred. This 
notion of producing superior human beings by 
the methods of the stud-farm had often been 
urged, though its difficulties had never been 
cleared up. I mean its practical difficulties; 
its moral difficulties, or rather impossibilities, 
for any animal fit to be called a man need 
scarcely be discussed. But even as a scheme 
it had never been made clear. The first and 
most obvious objection to it of course is this: 
that if you are to breed men as pigs, you 
require some overseer who is as much more 
subtle than a man as a man is more subtle 
than a pig. Such an individual is not easy to 
find. 

It was, however, in the heat of these three 
things, the decline of his merely destructive 
reahsm, the discovery of Nietzsche, and the 
abandonment of the idea of a progressive 
education of mankind, that he attempted what 
is not necessarily his best, but certainly his 
most important work. The two things are 
by no means necessarily the same. The most 
important work of Milton is Parad se Lost; 
his best work is Lycidas. There are other 
places in which Shaw's argument is more 
204 



The Philosopher 



fascinating or his wit more startling than in 
Man and Stiperrnan; there are other plays 
that he has made more brilliant. But I am 
sure that there is no other play that he wished 
to make more brilliant. I will not say that he 
is in this case more serious than elsewhere; 
for the word serious is a double-meaning and 
double-dealing word, a traitor in the diction- 
ary. It sometimes means solemn, and it some- 
times means sincere. A very short experience 
of private and public life will be enough to 
prove that the most solemn people are generally 
the most insincere. A somewhat more delicate 
and detailed consideration will show also that 
the most sincere men are generally not solemn; 
and of these is Bernard Shaw. But if we use 
the word serious in the old and Latin sense 
of the word "grave," which means weighty or 
valid, full of substance, then we may say 
without any hesitation that this is the most 
serious play of the most serious man alive. 

The outline of the play is, I suppose, by this 
time sufficiently well known. It has two main 
philosophic motives. The first is that what he 
calls the life-force (the old infidels called it 
Nature, which seems a neater word, and nobody 
knows the meaning of either of them) desires 
above all thmgs to make suitable marriages, 
205 



George Bernard Shaw 



to produce a purer and prouder race, or even- 
tually to produce a Superman. The second is 
that in this affecting of racial marriages the 
woman is a more conscious agent than the 
man. In short, that woman disposes a long 
time before man proposes. In this play, there- 
fore, woman is made the pursuer and man the 
pursued. It cannot be denied, I think, that 
in this matter Shaw is handicapped by his 
habitual hardness of touch, by his lack of 
sympathy with the romance of which he writes, 
and to a certain extent even by his own 
integrity and right conscience. Whether the 
man hunts the woman or the woman the man, 
at least it should be a splendid pagan hunt; 
but Shaw is not a sporting man. Nor is he 
a pagan, but a Puritan. He cannot recover 
the impartiality of paganism which allowed 
Diana to propose to Endymion without think- 
ing any the worse for her. The result is that 
while he makes Anne, the woman who marries 
his hero, a really powerful and convincing 
woman, he can only do it by making her a 
highly objectionable woman. She is a liar and 
a bully, not from sudden fear or excruciating 
dilemma; she is a liar and a bully in grain; 
she has no truth or magnanimity in her. The 
more we know" that she is real, the more we 

206 



The Philosopher 



know that she is vile. In short, Bernard 
Shaw is still haunted with his old impotence 
of the unromantic writer; he cannot imagine 
the main motives of human life from the 
inside. We are convinced successfully that 
Anne wishes to marry Tanner, but in the very 
process we lose all power of conceiving why 
Tanner should ever consent to marry Anne. 
A writer with a more romantic strain in him 
might have imagined a woman choosing her 
lover without shamelessness and magnetising 
him without fraud. Even if the first move- 
ment were feminine, it need hardly be a 
movement like this. In truth, of course, the 
two sexes have their two methods of attraction, 
and in some of the happiest cases they are 
almost simultaneous. But even on the most 
cynical showing they need not be mixed up. 
It is one thing to say that the mousetrap 
is not there by accident. It is another to say 
(in the face of ocular experience) that the 
mousetrap runs after the mouse. 

But whenever Shaws shows the Puritan 
hardness or even the Puritan cheapness, he 
shows something also of the Puritan nobility, 
of the idea that sacrifice is really a frivolity 
in the face of a great purpose. The reason- 
ableness of Calvin and his followers will by 
207 



George Bernard Shaw 



the mercy of heaven be at last washed away; 
but their unreasonableness will remain an 
eternal splendour. Long after we have let 
drop the fancy that Protestantism was rational 
it will be its glory that it was fanatical. So 
it is with Shaw. To make Anne a real 
woman, even a dangerous woman, he would 
need to be something stranger and softer than 
Bernard Shaw. But though I always argue 
with him whenever he argues, I confess that 
he always conquers me in the one or two 
moments when he is emotional. 

There is one really noble moment when 
Anne offers for all her cynical husband-hunt- 
ing the only defence that is really great 
enough to cover it . " It will not be all happi- 
ness for me. Perhaps death." And the man 
rises also at that real crisis, saying, "Oh, 
that clutch holds and hurts. What have you 
grasped in me ? Is there a father's heart as 
well as a mother's.^" That seems to me 
actually great; I do not like either of the 
characters an atom more than formerly; but 
I can see shining and shaking through them 
at that instant the splendour of the God that 
made them and of the image of God who 
wrote their story. 

A logician is like a liar in man^' respects, 
208 



The Pliilosopher 



but chiefly in the fact that he should have 
a good memory. That cutting and inquisi- 
tive style which Bernard Shaw has always 
adopted carries with it an inevitable criticism. 
And it cannot be denied that this new theory 
of the supreme importance of sound sexual 
union, wrought by any means, is hard logic- 
ally to reconcile with Shaw's old diatribes 
against sentimentalism and operatic romance. 
If Nature wishes primarily to entrap us into 
sexual union, then all the means of sexual 
attraction, even the most maudlin or theat- 
rical, are justified at one stroke. The guitar 
of the troubadour is as practical as the ploughr- 
share of the husbandman. The waltz in the 
ballroom is as serious as the debate in the 
parish council. The justification of Anne, as 
the potential mother of Superman, is really 
the justification of all the humbugs and sen- 
timentalists whom Shaw had been denouncing 
as a dramatic critic and as a dramatist since 
the beginning of his career. It was to no 
purpose that the earlier Bernard Shaw said 
that romance was all moonshine. The moon- 
shine that ripens love is now as practical as 
the sunshme that ripens corn. It was vain 
to say that sexual chivalry was all rot; it 
might be as rotten as manure — and also as 
O 209 



George Bernard Shaw 



fertile. It is vain to call first love a fiction; 
it may be as fictitious as the ink of the cuttle 
or the doubling of the hare; as fictitious, as 
eflScient, and as indispensable. It is vain to 
call it a self-deception; Schopenhauer said 
that all existence was a self-decept on; and 
Shaw's only further comment seems to be 
that it is right to be deceived. To Man 
and Superman, as to all his plays, the 
author attaches a most fascinating preface at 
the beginning. But I really think that he 
ought also to attach a hearty apology at the 
end; an apology to all the minor dramatists 
or preposterous actors whom he had cursed 
for romanticism in his youth. Whenever he 
objected to an actress for ogling she might 
reasonably reply, " But this is how I support 
my friend Anne in her sublime evolutionary 
effort." Whenever he laughed at an old- 
fashioned actor for ranting, the actor might 
answer, "My exaggeration is not more absurd 
than the tail of a peacock or the swagger of 
a cock; it is the way I preach the great fruit- 
ful lie of the life-force that I am a very fine 
fellow." We have remarked the end of Shaw's 
campaign in favour of progress. This ought 
really to have been the end of his campaign 
against romance. All t|||^ tricks of love that 

210 



Tlte Philosopher 



he called artificial become natural; because they 
become Nature. All the lies of love become 
truths; indeed they become the Truth. 

The minor things of the play contain some 
thunderbolts of good thinking. Throughout 
this brief study I have deliberately not dwelt 
upon mere wit, because in anything of Shaw's 
that may be taken for granted. It is enough 
to say that this play which is full of his most 
serious quality is as full as any of his minor sort 
of success. In a more solid sense two important 
facts stand out: the first is the character of 
the young American; the other is the character 
of Straker, the chauffeur. In these Shaw has 
realised and made vivid two most important 
facts. First, that America is not intellectually 
a go-ahead country, but both for good and 
evil an old-fashioned one. It is full of stale 
culture and ancestral simplicity, just as Shaw's 
young millionaire quotes Macaulay and piously 
worships his wife. Second, he has pointed 
out in the character of Straker that there 
has arisen in our midst a new class that 
has education without breeding. Straker is 
the man who has ousted the hansom-cabman, 
having neither his coarseness nor his kindli- 
ness. Great sociological credit is due to the 
man who has first clearlv observed that Straker 



211 



George Bernard Shaw 



has appeared. How anybody can profess for a 
moment to be glad that he has appeared, I do 
not attempt to conjecture. 

Appended to the play is an entertain- 
mg though somewhat mysterious document 
called "The Revolutionist's Handbook." It 
contains many very sound remarks; this, for 
example, which I cannot too much applaud: "If 
you hit your child, be sure that you hit him 
in anger." If that principle had been prop- 
erly understood, we should have had less of 
Shaw's sociological friends and their meddling 
with the habits and instincts of the poor. 
But among the fragments of advice also occurs 
the following suggestive and even alluring 
remark: "Every man over forty is a scoun- 
drel." On the first personal opportunity I 
asked the author of this remarkable axiom 
what it meant. I gathered that what it really 
meant was something like this: that every 
man over forty had been all the essential use 
that he was likely to be, and was therefore in 
a manner a parasite. It is gratifying to reflect 
that Bernard Shaw has sufficiently answered 
his own epigram by continuing to pour out 
treasures both of truth and folly long after 
this allotted time. But if the epigram might 
be interpreted in a rather looser style as 



Th e Ph ilosopher 



meaning that past a certain point a man's 
work takes on its final character and does not 
greatly change the nature of its merits, it 
may ceitainly be said that with Man and 
Superman, Shaw reaches that stage. The 
two plays that have followed it, though of 
very great interest in themselves, do not 
require any revaluation of, or indeed an)- 
addition to, our summary of his genius and 
success. They are both in a sense casts 
back to his primary energies; the first in a 
controversial and the second in a technical 
sense. Neither need prevent our saying that 
the moment when John Tanner and Anne 
agree that it is doom for him and death for 
her and life only for the thing unborn, is the 
peak of his utterance as a prophet. 

The two important plays that he has since 
given us are The Doctor s Dilemma and Getting 
Married. The first is as regards its most 
amusing and effective elements a throw-back 
to his old game of guying the men of science. 
It was a very good game, and he was an 
admirable player. The actual story of the 
Doctor s Dilemma itself seems to me less 
poignant and important than the things with 
which Shaw had lately been dealing. First of 
all, as has been said, Shaw has neither the 

213 



George Bernard Shaiv 



kind of justice nor the kind of weakness that 
goes to make a true problem. We cannot feel 
the Doctor's Dilemma, because we cannot 
really fancy Bernard Shaw being in a dilemma. 
His mind is both fond of abruptness and fond 
of finality; he always makes up his mind 
when he knows the facts and sometimes before. 
Moreover this particular problem (though 
Shaw is certainly, as we shall see, nearer to 
pure doubt about it than about anything else) 
does not strike the critic as being such an 
exasperating problem after all. An artist of 
vast power and promise, who is also a scamp 
of vast profligacy and treachery, has a chance 
of life if specially treated for a special disease. 
The modern doctors (and even the modern 
dramatist) are in doubt whether he should be 
specially favoured because he is aesthetically 
important or specially disregarded because he 
is ethically anti-social. They see-saw between 
the two despicable modern doctrines, one that 
geniuses should be worshipped like idols and 
the other that criminals should be mere 1 
wiped out like germs. That both clever men 
and bad men ought to be treated like men 
does not seem to occur to them. As a matter 
of fact, in these affairs of life and death one 
never does think of such distinctions. Nobody 
214 



The Philosopher 



does shout out at sea, "Bad citizen over- 
board!" I should recommend the doctor in 
his dilemma to do exactly what I am sure any 
decent doctor would do without any dilemma 
at all: to treat the man simply as a man, and 
give him no more and no less favour than 
he would to anybody else. In short, I am 
sure a practical physician would drop all these 
visionar}-, unworkable modern dreams about 
type and criminology and go back to the plain 
business-like facts of the French Revolution 
and the Rights of Man. 

The other play, Getting Married, is a point 
in Shaw's career, but only as a play, not, as 
usual, as a heresy. It is noth ng but a con- 
versation about marriage; and one cannot 
agree or disagree with the view of marriage, 
because all views are given which are held by 
anybody, and some (I should think) which are 
held by nobody. But its technical quality is 
of some importance in the life of its author. 
It is worth consideration as a play, because it 
is not a play at all. It marks the culmination 
and completeness of that victory of Bernard 
Shaw over the British public, or rather over 
their official representatives, of which I have 
spoken. Shaw had fought a long fight with 
business men, those incredible people, who 
215 



George Bernard Shatv 



assured him that it was useless to have wit 
without murders, and that a good joke, which 
is the most popular thing everywhere else was 
quite unsalable in the theatrical world. In 
spite of this he had conquered by his wit and 
his good dialogue; and by the time of which 
we now speak he was victorious and secure. 
All his plays were being produced as a matter 
of course in England and as a matter of the 
fiercest fashion and enthusiasm in America 
and Germany. No one who knows the nature 
of the man will doubt that under such cir- 
cumstances his first act would be to produce 
his wit naked and unashamed. He had been 
told that he could not support a slight play by 
mere dialogue. He therefore promptly pro- 
duced mere dialogue without the slightest 
play for it to support. Getting Married is no 
more a play than Cicero's dialogue De Amictia, 
and not half so much a play as Wilson's 
Noctes AmhrosiancE. But though it is not a 
play, it was played, and played successfully. 
Everyone who went into the theatre felt that 
he was only eavesdropping at an accidental 
conversation. But the conversation was so 
sparkling and sensible that he went on eaves- 
dropping. This, I think, as it is the final 
play of Shaw, is also, and fitly, his final 
216 



The PhilofiOj)her 



triumph. He is a good dramatist and some- 
times even a great dramatist. But the occa- 
sions when we get glimpses of him as really a 
great man are on these occasions when he is 
utterly undramatic. 

From first to last Bernard Shaw has been 
nothing but a conversationalist. It is not a 
slur to say so; Socrates was one, and even 
Christ Himself. He differs from that divine 
and that human prototype in the fact that, like 
most modern people, he does to some extent 
talk in order to find out what he thinks; 
whereas they knew it beforehand. But he has 
the virtues that go with the talkative man; 
one of which is humility. You will hardly 
ever find a really proud man talkative; he is 
afraid of talking too much. Bernard Shaw 
offered himself to the world with only one 
great qualification, that he could talk honestly 
and well. He did not speak; he talked to a 
crowd. He did not write; he talked to a 
typewriter. He did not really construct a 
play; he talked through ten mouths or masks 
instead of through one. His literary power 
and progress began in casual conversations — 
and it seems to me supremely right that it 
should end in one great and casual conversa- 
tion. His last play is nothing but garrulous 
217 



George Bernard SJiaw 



talking, that great thing called gossip. And I 
am happy to say that the play has been as 
efficient and successful as talk and gossip 
have always been among the children of men. 
Of his life in these later years I have made 
no pretence of telling even the Httle that there 
is to tell. Those who regard him as a mere 
self-advertising egotist may be surprised to 
hear that there is perhaps no man of whose 
private life less could be positively said by an 
outsider. Even those who know him can 
make little but a conjecture of what has lain 
behind this splendid stretch of intellectual 
self-expression; I only make my conjecture 
like the rest. I think that the first great 
turning-point in Shaw's life (after the early 
things of which I have spoken, the taint of 
drink in the teetotal home, or the first fight 
with poverty) w^as the deadly illness which fell 
upon him, at the end of his first flashing career 
as a Saturday Reviewer. I know it would 
goad Shaw to madness to suggest that sickness 
could have softened him. That is why I 
suggest it. But I say for his comfort that 
I think it hardened him also; if that can be 
called hardening which is only the strength- 
ening of our souls to meet some dreadful 
reality. At least it is certain that the larger 
218 



The Philosopher 



spiritual ambitions, the desire to find a faith 
and found a church, come after that time. 
I also mention it because there is hardly any- 
thing else to mention; his life is singularly 
free from landmarks, while his literature is so 
oddly full of surprises. His marriage to 
Miss Payne-Townsend, which occurred not 
long after his illness, was one of those quite 
successful things which are utterly silent. 
The placidity of his married life may be suffi- 
ciently indicated by saying that (as far as I 
can make out) the most important events in it 
were rows about the Executive of the Fabian 
Society. If such ripples do not express a still 
and lake-like life, I do not know what would. 
Honestly, the only thing in his later career 
that can be called an event is the stand made 
by Shaw at the Fabians against the sudden 
assault of Mr. H. G. Wells, which, after scenes 
of splendid exasperations, ended in Well's res- 
ignation. There was another slight ruffling of 
the calm when Bernard Shaw said some quite 
sensible things about Sir Henry Irving. But 
on the whole we confront the composure of 
one who has come into his own. 

The method of his life has remained mostly 
unchanged. And there is a great deal of 
method in his life; I can hear some people 
219 



George Bernard Shaiv 



murmuring something about method in his 
madness. He is not only neat and business- 
like; but, unHke some literary men I know, 
does not conceal the fact. Having all the 
talents proper to an author, he delights to 
prove that he has also all the talents proper to 
a publisher; or even to a publisher's clerk. 
Though many Icoking at his light brown 
clothes would call him a Bohemian, he really 
hates and despises Bohemianism; in the sense 
that he hates and despises disorder and unclean- 
ness and irresponsibility. All that part of him 
is peculiarly normal and efficient. He gives 
good advice; he always answers letters, and 
answers them in a decisive and very legible 
hand. He has said himself that the only 
educational art that he thinks important is 
that of being able to jump off tram-cars at the 
proper moment. Though a rigid vegetarian, 
he is quite regular and rational in his meals; 
and though he detests sport, he takes quite 
sufficient exercise. While he has always made 
a mock of science in theory, he is by nature 
prone to meddle with it in practice. He is 
fond of photographing, and even more fond of 
being photographed. He maintained (in one 
of his moments of mad modernity) that photog- 
raphy was a finer thing than portrait-painting, 

220 



The PhUosoplicr 



more exquisite and more imaginative; he 
urged the characteristic argument that none 
of his own photographs were like each other 
or Hke him. But he would certainly wash 
the chemicals off his hands the instant after an 
experiment; just as he would wash the blood 
off his hands the instant after a Socialist 
massacre. He cannot endure stains or accre- 
tions; he is of that temperament which feels 
tradition itself to be a coat of dust; whose 
temptation it is to feel nothing but a sort 
of foul accumulation or living disease even in 
the creeper upon the cottage or the moss upon 
the grave. So thoroughly are his tastes those 
of the civilised modern man that if it had not 
been for the fire in him of justice and anger 
he might have been the most trim and modern 
among the millions whom he shocks: and his 
bicycle and brown hat have been no menace in 
Brixton. But God sent among those subur- 
bans one w^ho was a prophet as well as a sani- 
tary inspector. He had every qualification for 
living in a villa — except the necessary indiffer- 
ence to his brethren living in pigstyes. But 
for the small fact that he hates with a sickening 
hatred the hypocrisy and class cruelty, he 
would really accept and admire the bathroom 
and the bicycle and asbestos-stove, having no 

221 



George Bernard Shaw 



memory of rivers or of roaring fires. In these 
things, like Mr. Straker, he is the New Man. 
But for his great soul he might have accepted 
modern civilisation; it was a wonderful escape. 
This man whom men so foolishly call crazy 
and anarchic has really a dangerous affinity to 
the fourth-rate perfections of our provincial 
and Protestant civilisation. He might even 
have been respectable if he had had less self- 
respect. 

His fulfilled fame and this tone of repose 
and reason in his life, together with the large 
circle of his private kindness and the regard of 
his fellow-artists, should permit us to end the 
record in a tone of almost patriarchal quiet. 
If I wished to complete such a picture I could 
add many touches: that he has consented to 
wear evening dress; that he has supported 
the Times Book Club; and that his beard has 
turned grey; the last to his regret, as he 
wanted it to remain red till they had completed 
colour-photography. He can mix with the 
most conservative statesmen; his tone grows 
continuously more gentle in the matter of 
religion. It would be easy to end with the 
lion lying down with the lamb, the wild Irish- 
man tamed or taming everybody, Shaw recon- 

222 



The Philosopher 



ciled to the British public as the British public 
is certainly largely reconciled to Shaw. 

But as I put these last papers together, 
having finished this rude study, I hear a piece 
of news. His latest play, The Shotving Up of 
Blanco Posnet, has been forbidden by the 
Censor. As far as I can discover, it has been 
forbidden because one of the characters pro- 
fesses a belief in God and states his conviction 
that God has got him. This is wholesome; 
this is like one crack of thunder in a clear 
sky. Not so easily does the prince of this 
world forgive. Shaw's religious training and 
instinct is not mine, but in all honest religion 
there is something that is hateful to the 
prosperous compromise of our time. You 
are free in our time to say that God does not 
exist; you are free to say that He exists and 
IS evil; you are free to say (like poor old 
Renan) that He would like to exist if He could. 
You may talk of God as a metaphor or a 
mystification; you may water Him down with 
gallons of long words, or boil Him to the rags 
of metaphysics; and it is not merely that 
nobody punishes, but nobody protests. But 
if you speak of God as a fact, as a thing like 
a tiger, as a reason for changing one's con- 
duct, then the modern world will stop you 
223 



George Beiiiard Shaw 



somehow if it can. We are long past talking 
about whether an unbeliever should be 
punished for being irreverent. It is now 
thought irreverent to be a believer. I end 
where I began: it is the old Puritan in Shaw 
that jars the modern world like an electric 
shock. That vision with which I meant to 
end, that vision of culture and common-sense, 
of red brick and brown flannel, of the modern 
clerk broadened enough to embrace Shaw and 
Shaw softened enough to embrace the clerk, 
all that vision of a new London begins to fade 
and alter. The red brick begins to burn red- 
hot; and the smoke from all the chimneys has 
a strange smell. I find myself back in the 
fumes in which I started. . . . Perhaps I have 
been misled by small modernities. Perhaps 
what I have called fastidiousness is a divine 
fear. Perhaps what I have called coldness is 
a predestinate and ancient endurance. The 
vision of the Fabian villas grows fainter and 
fainter, until I see only a void place across 
which runs Bunyan's Pilgrim with his fingers 
m his ears. 

Bernard Shaw has occupied much of his life 
in trying to elude his followers. The fox has 
enthusiastic followers, and Shaw seems to 
regard his in much the same way. This man 

224 



The Philosohhei 



whom men accuse of bidding for applause 
seems to me to shrink even from assent. If 
you agree with Shaw he is very Hkely to 
contradict you; I have contradicted Shaw 
throughout, that is why I come at last almost 
to agree with him. His critics have accused 
him of vulgar self-advertisement; in his 
relation to his followers he seems to me 
rather marked with a sort of mad modesty. 
He seems to wish to fly from agreement, to 
have as few followers as possible. All this 
reaches back, I think, to the three roots from 
which this meditation grew. It is partly the 
mere impatience and irony of the Irishman. 
It is partly the thought of the Calvinist that 
the host of God should be thinned rather than 
thronged; that Gideon must reject soldiers 
rather than recruit them. And it is partly, 
alas, the unhappy Progressive trying to be in 
front of his own religion, trying to destroy his 
own idol and even to desecrate his own tomb. 
But from whatever causes, this furious escape 
from popularity has involved Shaw in some 
perversities and refinements which are almost 
mere insincerities, and which make it neces- 
sary to disentangle the good he has done from 
the evil in this dazzling course. I will at- 
tempt some summary by stating the three 

225 



George Bernard Shaw 



things in which his influence seems to me 
thoroughly good and the three in which it 
seems bad. But for the pleasure of ending 
on the finer note I will speak first of those 
that seem bad. 

The primary respect in which Shaw has 
been a bad influence is that he has encouraged 
fastidiousness. He has made men dainty 
about their moral meals. This is indeed the 
root of his whole objection to romance. 
Many people have objected to romance for 
being too airy and exquisite. Shaw objects 
to romance for being too rank and coarse. 
Many have despised romance because it is 
unreal; Shaw really hates it because it is a 
great deal too real. Shaw dislikes romance as 
he dislikes beef and beer, raw brandy or raw 
beefsteaks. Romance is too masculine for 
his taste. You will find throughout his 
criticisms, amid all their truth, their wild 
justice or pungent impartiality, a curious 
undercurrent of prejudice upon one point: 
the preference for the refined rather than the 
rude or ugly. Thus he will dislike a joke 
because it is coarse without asking if it is 
really immoral. He objects to a man sitting 
down on his hat, whereas the austere moralist 
should only ob ect to his sitting down on 

226 . 



The PJiilo.s-oi:l(cr 



someone else's hat. This sensibility is barren 
because it is uni^ersal. It is useless to object 
to man being made ridiculous. Man is born 
ridiculous, as can easily be seen if you look at 
him soon after he is born. It is grotesque to 
drink beer, but it is equally grotesque to 
drink soda-water; the grotesqueness lies in 
the act of filling yourself like a bottle through 
a hole. It is undignified to walk with a 
drunken stagger; but it is fairly undignified 
to walk at all, for all walking is a sort ot 
balancing, and there is always in the human 
being something of a quadruped on its hind 
legs. I do not say he would be more digni- 
fied if he went on all fours; I do not know- 
that he ever is dignified except when he is dead. 
We shall not be refined till we are refined into 
dust. Of course it is only because he is not 
wholly an animal that man sees he is a rum 
animal; and if man on his hind legs is in an 
artificial attitude, it is only because, like a dog, 
he is begging or saying thank you. 

Everything important is in that sense absurd 
from the grave baby to the grinning skull; 
everything practical is a practical joke. But 
throughout Shaw's comedies, curiously enough, 
there is a certain kicking against this great 
doom of laughter. For instance, it is the first 
227 



George Bernard Shaw 



duty of a man who is in love to make a fool 
of himself; but Shaw's heroes always seem to 
flinch from this, and attempt, in airy, philosophic 
revenge, to make a fool of the woman first. 
The attempts of Valentine and Chartaris to 
divide their perceptions from their desires, and 
tell the woman she is worthless even while 
trying to win her, are sometimes almost tor- 
turing to watch; it is like seeing a man trying 
to play a different tune with each hand. I fancy 
this agony is not only in the spectator, but in 
the dramatist as well. It is Bernard Shaw 
struggling with his reluctance to do anything 
so ridiculous as make a proposal. For there 
are two types of great humorist: those who 
love to see a man absurd and those who hate 
to see him absurd. Of the first kind are Rabe- 
lais and Dickens; of the second kind are 
Swift and Bernard Shaw. 

So far as Shaw has spread or helped a certain 
modern reluctance or iiiauvaise honte \n these 
grand and grotesque functions of man I think 
he has definitely done harm. He has much 
influence among the young men; but it is not 
an influence in the direction of keeping them 
young. One cannot imagine him inspiring 
any of his followers to write a war-song or 
a drinking-song or a love-song, the three 
228 



The Philosoj.'Jicr 



forms of human utterance which come next in 
nobility to a prayer. It may seem odd to 
say that the net effect of a man so apparently 
impudent will be to make men shy. But it is 
certainly the truth. Shyness is always the 
sign of a divided soul; a man is shy because 
he somehow thinks his position at once de- 
spicable and important. If he were without 
humility he would not care; and if he were 
without pride he would not care. Now the 
main purpose of Shaw's theoretic teaching is 
to declare that we ought to fulfil these great 
functions of life, that we ought to eat and 
drink and love. But the main tendency of 
his habitual criticism is to suggest that all the 
sentiments, professions, and postures of these 
things are not only comic but even con- 
temptibly comic, follies and almost frauds. 
The result would seem to be that a race of 
young men may arise who do all these things, 
but do them awkwardly. That which was of 
old a free and hilarious function becomes an 
important and embarrassing necessity. Let us 
endure all the pagan pleasures with a Christian 
patience. Let us eat, drink, and be serious. 

The second of the two points on which I 
think Shaw has done definite harm is this: 
that he has (not always or even as a rule in- 
229 



George Bernard Shaw 



tentionally) increased that anarchy of thought 
which is always the destruction of thought. 
Much of his early writing has encouraged 
among the modern youth that most pestilent 
of all popular tricks and fallacies; what is 
called the argument of progress. I mean this 
kind of thing. Previous ages were often, alas, 
aristocratic in politics or clericalist in religion; 
but they were always democratic in philosophy; 
they appealed to man, not to particular men. 
And if most men were against an idea, that 
was so far against it. But nowadays that 
most men are against a thing is thought to 
be in its favour; it is vaguely supposed to 
show that some day most men will be for it. 
If a man says that cows are reptiles, or that 
Bacon wrote Shakespeare, he can always quote 
the contempt of his contemporaries as in some 
mysterious way proving the comp ete con- 
version of posterity. The ob]ections to this 
theory scarcely need any elaborate indication. 
The hnal objection to it is that it amounts to 
this: say anything, however idiotic, and you 
are in advance of your age. This kind of 
stuff must be stopped. The sort of democrat 
who appeals to the babe unborn must be 
classed with the sort of aristocrat who appeals 
to his deceased great-grandfather. Both 
230 



Th c Pli ilosopher 



should be sharply reminded that they are 
appealing to individuals whom they well know 
to be at a disadvantage in the matter of prompt 
and witty reply. Now although Bernard 
Shaw has survived this simple confusion, he 
has in his time greatly contributed to it. It 
there is, for instance, one thing that is really 
rare in Shaw it is hesitation. He makes up 
his mind quicker than a calculating boy or a 
county magistrate. Yet on this subject of 
the next change in ethics he has felt hesi- 
tation, and being a strictly honest man has 
expressed it. 

"I know no harder practical question than 
how much selfishness one ought to stand from 
a gifted person for the sake of his gifts or on 
the chance of his being right in the long run. 
The Superman will certainly come like a thief 
in the night, and be shot at accordingly; but 
we cannot leave our property wholly un- 
defended on that account. On the other hand, 
we cannot ask the Superman simply to add a 
higher set of virtues to current respectable 
morals; for he is undoubtedly going to empty 
a good deal of respectable morality out like so 
much dirty water, and replace it by new and 
strange customs, shedding old obligations and 
accepting new and heavier ones. Every step 

231 



George Bernard Shaw 



of his progress must horrify conventional 
people; and if it were possible for even the 
most superior man to march ahead all the 
time, every pioneer of the march towards the 
Superman would be crucified." 

When the most emphatic man alive, a man 
unmatched in violent precision of statement, 
speaks with such avowed vagueness and doubt 
as this, it is no wonder if all his more weak- 
minded followers are in a mere whirlpool of 
uncritical and unmeaning innovation. If the 
superior person will be apparently criminal, 
the most probable result is simply that the 
criminal person will think himself superior. 
A very slight knowledge of human nature 
is required in the matter. If the Superman 
may possibly be a thief, you may bet your 
boots that the next thief will be a Superman. 
But indeed the Supermen (of whom I have 
met many) have generally been more weak in 
the head than in the moral conduct; they 
have simply offered the first fancy which occu- 
pied their minds as the new morality. I fear 
that Shaw had a way of encouraging these 
follies. It is obvious from the passage I have 
quoted that he has no way of restraining 
them. 

The truth is that all feeble spirits naturally 

232 



Tlic Fhi\osopher 



live in the future, because it is featureless; it 
is a soft job; you can make it what you Hke. 
The next age is blank, and I can paint it freely 
with my favourite colour. It requires real 
courage to face the past, because the past is 
full of facts which cannot be got over; of 
men certainly wiser than we and of things 
done which we could not do. I know I 
cannot write a poem as good as Lycidas. But 
it is always easy to say that the particular sort 
of poetry I can write will be the poetry of the 
future. 

This I call the second evil influence oi 
Shaw: that he has encouraged many to throw 
themselves for justification upon the shapeless 
and the unknown. In this, though courageous 
himself, he has encouraged cowards, and though 
sincere himself, has helped a mean escape. 
The third evil in his influence can, I think, be 
much more shortly dealt with. He has to a 
very slight extent, but still perceptibly, en- 
couraged a kind of charlatanism of utterance 
among those who possess his Irish impudence 
without his Irish virtue. For instance, his 
amusing trick of self-praise is perfectly hearty 
and humorous in him; nay, it is even 
humble; for to confess vanity is itself humble. 
All that is the matter with the proud is that 



George Bernard Shaw 



they will not admit that they are vain. There- 
fore when Shaw says that he alone is able to 
write such and such admirable work, or that 
he has just utterly wiped out some celebrated 
opponent, I for one never feel anything offen- 
sive in the tone, but, indeed, only the un- 
mistakable intonation of a friend's voice. 
But I have noticed among younger, harder, 
and much shallower men a certain disposition 
to ape this insolent ease and certitude, and 
that without any fundamental frankness or 
mirth. So far the influence is bad. Egoism 
can be learnt as a lesson like any other "ism." 
It is not so easy to learn an Irish accent or a 
good temper. In its lower forms the thing 
becomes a most unmilitary trick of announcing 
the victory before one has gained it. 

When one has said those three things, one 
has said, I think, all that can be said by way 
of blaming Bernard Shaw. It is significant that 
he was never blamed for any of these thmgs 
by the Censor. Such censures as the attitude 
of that official involves may be dismissed with 
a very light sort of disdain. To represent 
Shaw as profane or provocatively indecent is 
not a matrer for discussion at all; it is a dis- 
gusting criminal libel upon a particularly re- 
spectable gentleman of the middle classes, ot 

234 



The Philosopher 



refined tastes and somewhat Puritanical views. 
But while the negative defence of Shaw is 
easy, the just praise of him is almost as com- 
plex as it is necessary; and I shall devote the 
last few pages of this book to a triad corre- 
sponding to the last one — to the three im- 
portant elements in which the work of Shaw 
has been good as well as great. 

In the first place, and quite apart from all 
particular theories, the world owes thanks to 
Bernard Shaw for having combined being 
intelligent with being intelligible. He has 
popularised philosophy, or rather he has re- 
popularised it, for philosophy is always popu- 
lar, except in peculiarly corrupt and oligarchic 
ages like our own. We have passed the age 
of the demagogue, the man who has little to 
say and says it loud. We have come to the 
age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has 
nothing to say, but says it softly and impres- 
sively in an indistinct whisper. After all, 
short words must mean something, even if 
they mean filth or lies; but long words may 
sometimes mean literally nothing, especially 
if they are used (as they mostly are in 
modern books and magazine articles) to 
balance and modify each other. A plain 
figure 4, scrawled in chalk a ha where, must 



George Bernard Shaw 



always mean something; it must always 
mean 2 + 2. But the most enormous and 
mysterious algebraic equation, full of letters, 
brackets, and fractions, may all cancel out at 
last and be equal to nothing. When a dema- 
gogue says to a mob, "There is the Bank of 
England, why shouldn't you have some of 
that money?" he says something which is at 
least as honest and intelligible as the figure 4. 
When a writer in the Tiines remarks, "We 
must raise the economic efficiency of the 
masses without diverting anything from those 
classes which represent the national pros- 
perity and refinement," then his equation 
cancels out; in a literal and logical sense his 
remark amounts to nothing. 

There are two kinds of charlatans or people 
called quacks to-day. The power of the first 
is that he advertises — and cures. The power 
of the second is that though he is not learned 
enough to cure he is much too learned to 
advertise. The former give away their dignity 
with a pound of tea; the latter are paid a 
pound of tea merely for being dignified. I think 
them the worse quacks of the two. Shaw is 
certainly of the other sort. Dickens, another 
man who was great enough to be a demagogue 
(and greater than Shaw because more heartily 
236 



The Ph ilosopher 



a demagogue), puts for ever the true difference 
between the demagogue and the mystagogue in 
Dr. Mangold: "Except that we're cheap jacks 
and they're dear-jacks, I don't see any dif- 
ference between us." Bernard Shaw is a great 
cheap-jack, with plenty of patter and I dare 
say plenty of nonsense, but with this also 
(which is not wholly unimportant), with 
goods to sell. People accuse such a man 
of self-advertisement. But at least the cheap- 
jack does advertise his wares, whereas the don 
or dear-jack advertises nothing except himself. 
His very silence, nay his very sterility, are 
supposed to be marks of the richness of his 
erudition. He is too learned to teach, and 
sometimes too wise even to talk. St. Thomas 
Aquinas said: "In auctore auctoritas." But 
there is more than one man at Oxford or 
Cambridge who is considered an authority 
because he has never been an author. 

Against all this mystification both of silence 
and verbosity Shaw has been a splendid and 
smashing protest. He has stood up for the 
fact that philosophy is not the concern of those 
who pass through Divinity and Greats, but of 
those who pass through birth and death. 
Nearly all the most awful and abstruse state- 
ments can be put in words of one syllable, 

237 



George Bernard Shmv 



from "A child is born" to "A soul is 
damned." If the ordinary man may not dis- 
cuss existence, why should he be asked to 
conduct it ? About concrete matters indeed 
one naturally appeals to an oligarchy or select 
class. For information about Lapland I go to 
an aristocracy of Laplanders; for the ways ot 
rabbits to an aristocracy of naturalists or, pref- 
erably, an aristocracy of poachers. But only 
mankind itself can bear witness to the abstract 
first principles of mankind, and in matters of 
theory I would always consult the mob. Only 
the mass of men, for instance, have authority 
to say whether life is good. Whether life is 
good is an especially mystical and delicate 
question, and, like all such questions, is asked 
in words of one syllable. It is also answered 
in words of one syllable, and Bernard Shaw 
(as also mankind) answers "yes." 

This plain, pugnacious style of Shaw has 
greatly clarified all controversies. He has 
slain the polysyllable, that huge and slimy 
centipede which has sprawled over all the 
valleys of England like the "loathly worm" 
who was slain by the ancient knight. He does 
not think that difficult questions will be made 
simpler by using difficult words about them. 
He has achieved the admirable work, never to 



The Philosopher 



be mentioned without gratitude, of discussing 
Evolution without mentioning it. The good 
work is of course more evident in the case of 
philosophy than any other region; because 
the case of philosophy was a crying one It 
was really preposterous that the things most 
carefully reserved for the study of two or 
three men should actually be the things com- 
mon to all men. It was absurd that certain 
men should be experts on the special subject oi 
everything. But he stood for much the same 
spirit and style in other matters; in economics, 
for example. There never has been a better 
popular economist; one more lucid, enter- 
taining, consistent, and essentially exact. The 
very comicality of his examples makes them 
and their argument stick in the mind; as in 
the case I remember in which he said that the 
big shops had now to please everybody, and 
were not entirely dependent on the lady who 
sails in "to order four governesses and five 
grand pianos." He is always preaching collec- 
tivism; yet he does not very often name it. 
He does not talk about collectivism, but 
about cash; of which the populace feel a much 
more definite need. He talks about cheese, 
hoots, perambulators, and how people are really 
to live. For him economics really means 
2 239 



George Bernard Shaw 



housekeeping, as it does in Greek. His 
difference from the othodox economists, like 
most of his differences, is very different from 
the attacks made by the main body of Socialists. 
The old Manchester economists are generally 
attacked for being too gross and material. 
Shaw really attacks them for not being gross 
or material enough. He thinks that they 
hide themselves behind long words, remote 
hypotheses or unreal generalisations. When 
the orthodox economist begins with his correct 
and primary formula, '' Suppose there is a 
Man on an Island " Shaw is apt to inter- 
rupt him sharply, saying, "There is a Man in 
the Street." 

The second phase of the man's really fruitful 
efficacy is in a sense the converse of this. He 
has improved philosophic discussions by 
making them more popular. But he has also 
improved popular amusements by making them 
more philosophic. And by more philosophic 
1 do not mean duller, but funnier; that is 
more varied. All real fun is in cosmic con- 
trasts, which involve a view of the cosmos. 
But I know that this second strength in Shaw 
IS really difficult to state and must be 
approached by explanations and even by 
eliminations. Let me say at once that I think 

2+0 



The Philosopher 



nothing of Shaw or anybody else merely for 
playing the daring sceptic. I do not think he 
has done any good or even achieved any effect 
simply by asking startling questions. It is 
possible that there have been ages so sluggish 
or automatic that anything that woke them up 
at all was a eood thing. It is sufficient to be 
certain that ours is not such an age. We do 
not need waking up; rather we suffer from 
insomnia, with all its results of fear and ex- 
aggeration and frightful waking dreams. The 
modern mind is not a donkey which wants 
kicking to make it go on. The modern mind 
is more like a motor-car on a lonely road 
which two amateur motorists have been just 
clever enough to take to pieces, but are not 
quite clever enough to put together again. 
Under these circumstances kicking the car has 
never been found by the best experts to be 
effective. No one, therefore, does any good 
to our age merely by asking questions — unless 
he can answer the questions. Asking questions 
is already the fashionable and aristocratic sport 
which has brought most of us into the 
bankruptcy court. The note of our age is a 
note of interrogation. And the final point is 
so plain; no sceptical philosopher can ask any 
questions that may not equally be asked by a 
241 



George Bernard Shaw 



tired child on a hot afternoon. • "Am I a 
boy ? — Why am I a boy ? — Why aren't I a 
chair ? — What is a chair ?" A child will some- 
times ask this sort of questions for two hours. 
And the philosophers of Protestant Europe 
have asked them for two hundred years. 

If that were all that I meant by Shaw 
making men more philosophic, 1 should put it 
not among his good influences but his bad. 
He did do that to some extent; and so far he 
is bad. But there is a much bigger and better 
sense in which he has been a philosopher. He 
has brought back into English drama all the 
streams of fact or tendency which are commonly 
called undramatic. They were there in 
Shakespeare's time; but they have scarcely 
been there since until Shaw. I mean that 
Shakespeare, being interested in everything, 
put everything into a play. If he had lately 
been thinking about the irony and even con- 
tradiction confronting us in self-preservation 
and suicide, he put it all into Hatnlet. It he 
was annoyed by some passing boom in theatrical 
babies he put that into Hamlet too. He would 
put anything into Hamlet which he really 
thought was true, from his favourite nursery 
ballads to his personal (and perhaps unfashion- 
able) conviction of the Catholic purgatory. 
242 



Th e Ph ilosoplter 



There is no fact that strikes one, I think, about 
vShakespeare, except the fact of how dramatic 
he could be, so much as the fact of how 
undramatic he could be. 

In this great sense Shaw has brought philos- 
ophy back into drama — philosophy in the 
sense of a certain freedom of the mind. This 
is not a freedom to think what one likes 
(which is absurd, for one can only think what 
one thinks); it is a freedom to think about 
what one likes, which is quite a different thing 
and the spring of all thought. Shakespeare 
(in a weak moment, I think) said that all the 
world is a stage. But Shakespeare acted on 
the much finer principle that a stage is all the 
world. So there are in all Bernard Shaw's 
plays patches of what people would call essen- 
tially undramatic stuff', which the dramatist 
puts in because he is honest and would rather 
prove his case than succeed with his play. 
Shaw has brought back into English drama 
that Shakespearian universality which, if you 
like, you can call Shakespearian irrelevance. 
Perhaps a better definition than either is a 
habit of thinking the truth worth telling 
even when you meet it by accident. In Shaw's 
plays one meets an incredible number of truths 
by accident. 

243 



George Bernard Shaw 



To be up to date is a paltry ambition except 
in an almanac, and Shaw has sometimes talked 
this almanac philosophy. Nevertheless there 
is a real sense in which the phrase may be 
wisely used, and that is in cases where some 
stereotyped version of what is happening hides 
what is really hapening from our eves. Thus, 
for instance, newspapers are never up to date, 
i he men who write leading articles are always 
behind the times, because they are in a hurry. 
They are forced to fall back on their old- 
fashioned view of things; they have no time 
to fashion a new one. Everything that is 
done in a hurry is certain to be antiquated; 
that is why modern industrial civilisation bears 
so curious a resemblance to barbarism. Thus 
when newspapers say that t!ie Times is a 
solemn old Tory paper, they are out of date; 
their talk is behind the talk in Fleet Street. 
Thus when newspapers say that Christian 
dogmas are crumbling, they are out of date; 
their talk is behind the talk in public-houses. 
Now in this sense Shaw has kept in a really 
stirring sense up to date. He has introduced 
into the theatre the things that no one else 
had introduced into a theatre — the things in 
the street outside. The theatre is a sort 
ot thing which proudly sends a hansom-cab 

^44 



The PJiilo,sopher 



across the stage as Realism, while everybody 
outside is whistling for motor-cabs. 

Consider in this respect how many and fine 
have been Shaw's intrusions into the theatre 
with the things that were really going on. Daily 
papers and daily matinees were still gravely 
explaining how much modern war depended 
on gunpowder. Jrms and the Man explained 
how much modern war depends on chocolate. 
Every play and paper described the Vicar who 
was a mild Conservative. Candida caught hold 
of the modern Vicar who is an advanced 
Socialist. Numberless magazine articles and 
society comedies describe the emancipated 
woman as new and wild. Only Tou Never Can 
Tell was young enough to see that the emanci- 
pated woman is already old and respectable. 
Every comic paper has caricatured the un- 
educated upstart. Only the author of Man 
and Superman knew enough about the modern 
world to caricature the educated upstart — the 
man Straker who can quote Beaumarchais, 
though he cannot pronounce him. This is 
the second real and great work of Shaw — the 
letting in of the world on to the stage, as 
the rivers were let in upon the Augean Stable. 
He has let a little of the Haymarket into the 
Haymarket Theatre. He has permitted some 

245 



George Bernard Shaiu 



whispers of the Strand to enter the Strand 
Theatre. A variety of solutions in philosophy 
is as silly as it is in arithmetic, but one may 
be justly proud of a variety of materials for 
a solution. After Shaw, one may say, there is 
nothing that cannot be introduced into a play 
if one can make it decent, amusing, and rele- 
vant. The state of a man's health, the religion 
of his childhood, his ear for music, or his 
ignorance of cookery can all be made vivid if 
they have anything to do with the subject. A 
soldier may mention the commissariat as well 
as the cavalry; and, better still, a priest may 
mention theology as well as religion. That 
is being a philosopher; that is bringing the 
universe on the stage. 

Lastly, he has obliterated the mere cynic. 
He has been so much more cynical than any- 
one else for the public good that no one has 
dared since to be really cynical for anything 
smaller. The Chinese crackers of the frivolous 
cynics fail to excite us after the dynamite of 
the serious and aspiring cynic. Bernard Shaw 
and I (who are growing grey together) can 
remember an epoch which many of his 
followers do not know: an epoch of real 
pessimism. The years from 1885 to 1898 
were like the hours of afternoon in a rich 
246 



The Philosopher 



house with large rooms; the hours before 
tea-time. They believed in nothing except 
good manners; and the essence of good 
manners is to conceal a yawn. A yawn may 
be defined as a silent yell. The power which 
the young pessimist of that time showed in 
this direction would have astonished anyone 
but him. He yawned so wide as to swallow 
the world. He swallowed the world like an 
unpleasant pill before retiring to an eternal 
rest. Now the last and best glory of Shaw 
is that in the circles where this creature was 
found, he is not. He has not been killed (I 
don't know exactly why), but he has actually 
turned into a Shaw idealist. This is no ex- 
aggeration. I meet men who, when I knew 
them in 1898, were just a little too lazy to 
destroy the universe. They are now con- 
scious of not being quite worthy to abolish 
some prison regulations. This destruction 
and conversion seem to me the mark of 
something actually great. It is always great 
to destroy a type without destroying a man. 
The followers of Shaw are optimists; some 
of them are so simple as even to use the 
word. They are sometimes rather pallid op- 
timists, frequently very worried optimists, 
occasionally, to tell the truth, rather cross 

^47 



George Bernard Shaw 



optimists: but they not pessimists; they 
can exult though they cannot laugh. He has 
at least withered up among them the mere 
pose of impossibility. Like every great 
teacher, he has cursed the barren fig-tree. 
For nothing except that impossibihty is really 
impossible. 



I know it is all very strange. From the 
height of eight hundred years ago, or of eight 
hundred years hence, our age must look in- 
credibly odd. We call the twelfth century 
ascetic. We call our own time hedonist and 
full of praise and pleasure. But in the ascetic 
age the love of life was evident and enormous, 
so that it had to be restrained. In an hedonist 
age pleasure has always sunk low, so that it 
has to be encouraged. How high the sea of 
human happiness lose in the Middle Ages, 
we now only know by the colossal walls that 
they built to keep it in bounds. How low 
human happiness sank in the twentieth cen- 
tury our children will only know by these 
extraordinary modern books, which tell people 
that it is a duty to be cheerful and that life is 
not so bad after all. Humanity never pro- 
duces optimists till it has ceased to produce 

248 



The Philosopher 



happy men. It is strange to be obliged to 
impose a holiday like a fast, and to drive men 
to a banquet with spears. But this shall be 
written of our time: that when the spirit who 
denies besieged the last citadel, blaspheming 
life itself, there were some, there was one 
especially, whose voice was heard and whose 
spear was never broken. 



THE END 



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